IT Werkz Sometimes

I have a science fiction blog, with reviews of books from the golden age of science fiction, using Wordpress and hosted by them so there are restrictions with what you can do with it compared to other blogging software and specially compared to own hosted blogs.

I thought it would be neat if I could have have some ads against the reviews and the obvious choice would be Amazon ads for the books being reviewed. With a Wordpress hosted blog that is out of the question as they don’t allow ads. I could put some on but sooner or later they would have to be removed or the blog would be deleted by the Wordpress guys.

Blogspot blogs allow ads via Amazon and Adsense so I’ve been seeing how that might work and it is a bit messy. Apart from trying to make the look of the Blogspot blog look like the Wodpress version there is the great big problem of getting the content from one to the other. This is usually done via exporting the content to an xml file from the Wordpress blog and importing the same xml file into the Blogspot blog. I gave that a go and the import process failed. Did a Google on that and yup that ain’t gonna work. But there is a site that will convert an exported Wordpress xml file into the format that Blogspot likes but only with xml files no larger than 1 meg. My Wordpress xml file was about 50 meg so what could I do? I exported a subset, by author, of the Wordpress posts and that did keep the xml files down to 1 meg or less.

I ran one through the converter and out popped a Blogspot friendly xml file which did import into Blogspot. The posts, on Wordpress, had a picture of the reviewed books cover on the top line, aligned to the right using the old deprecated class=alignright. Wordpress might be OK with that but Blogspot wasn’t so the book cover was displayed on the top line but with the bottom of the cover aligned with the first line of the post and it looked hopeless.

With Blogspot it was quite easy to add some CSS so I added .align-right { float:right; margin: 0 0 15px 15px; } which will take care of the right alignment that I wanted, the only trouble being that the line needed to replace the class=alignright line in every post, and there are about 400 of them. In fact it was a bit messier than that as the line to be replaced was something like class=”alignright size-full wp-image-4″, which includes the image file name and that would be different for every image.

The workaround for this was to edit the original Wordpress xml file, in Notepad, and do a search and replace of every instance of ‘class=”alignright”‘ with my newly added CSS ‘class=align-right’. This worked OK but did leave the trailing ’size-full wp-image-4′ in the xml file but that is ignored so what the heck. I then reconverted the xml file to make it Blogspot friendly and imported that into Blogspot and the book cover images are all displayed correctly right aligned. Hallelujah.

Next up is seeing if I can find an uploadable version of the Wordpress theme I use onto Blogspot and what kind of mess that will end up looking. Jeez, all this to get some crumby ads displayed.

I received an email from an agent the other day about a position that needed lots of Wordpress experience.

I’ve been messing with Wordpress for a couple of years using both the Wordpress hosted Wordpress.com version of the software and my own hosted Wordpress.org variant of the software. I responded to the agents email and mentioned all of this but also that I hadn’t done any of this Wordpress messing about at any site but solely at home, which of course, counts for not much. Shame really as I think I’d prefer generating web pages and blogs than testing some legacy old mainframe, which I am always only about 2 steps away from.

I created a music Wordpress blog recently which worked OK and also created a science fiction review site which was quite popular. Both of the blogs were added to Google, Bing and Yahoo OK. The syfy blog initially was just for book reviews of Arthur C. Clarke. After a few days it was obvious that I was going to run out of book reviews to add to the blog (Waddayamean ‘after a few days’, didn’t you realise there are only so many reviews of a dead author you can pinch? Ed). So I widened the site to include syfy authors from the Golden Age of science fiction i.e. the 40’s and 50’s. I can see this blog getting expanded to include other eras as well.

I exported the entries from the ACC blog to an XML file and created a new blog and imported the ACC entries into that. Then I started to harvest other authors and add their entries. The first day it ran I got about 100 hits then on the 2nd day virtually none. I checked Google and the new blog had been de-indexed. Think that was probably because all of the initial entries on the new blog already existed on the slightly older ACC blog and search engines don’t like multiple blogs with the same entries. Hmmmm…. what to do. I removed all of the entries from the older ACC blog and resubmitted the URL to Google and Bing. After a couple of days the old blog had been removed from Google and I was able to resubmit the new blog to Google and later on it was indexed.

Generating a decent amount of content for blogs takes a lot of time so the music blog that I created I’ll leave alone, though I’ve checked and its still getting a dribble of hits.

I created some blogs recently on the kind of stuff I’d like to read on sci-fi books and music reviews.

It was quite easy and having created some entries I hurled the blogs URL at Google and Bing and waited to see if any poor schmucks wanted to read them, and they did. Seemed that quite a few people read the entries via RSS feeds. There wasn’t much original content as the blogs were full of reviews I’d copied and pasted from other sites so they weren’t very SEO friendly. Think the search engines actually do some comparison of entries against other similar subject blogs entries and if my stuff isn’t original then you stay way down in the search engine results pages. Fair enough.

My net connection was crawling this morning so I rebooted the router and then both PC’s but it didn’t make any difference. Thought I’d check the service providers status page to see if it was their problem but my connection was so lousy I was getting timed out before the page had loaded. I then phoned them to listen to their sytem status messages but my area was supposed to be OK. I then resorted to the dreaded logon to the router to see if anything was up there. I hadn’t connected to the router for ages and couldn’t remember the correct settings anyway but I convinced myself that it looked OK. What I should do is take a screen dump of each of the routers setting pages and print the darn things off. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. That’ll never happen.

What else could I reboot? Aha..what about the cable modem. I’ve never powered that off in the last two years and gave that a go. Did that make a difference? You betcha. The net connection suddenly flew like it hadn’t for ages. It’s obviously been getting a bit slower for the last couple of months.

And the moral of the story? Once a month use one of the broadband speed testing sites to make sure you’re getting the connection you’re paying for and if not reboot stuff.