I got all of my WordPress entries into my Blogspot version of the blog but when push came to something else I didn’t really like the look of Blogger/Blogspot blogs much.

It was obvious that the thing to do was to get my own hosted version of a WordPress blog. I found a cheap host, registered a neat domain, downloaded the latest version of WordPress, unzipped it, FTP’d the WordPress files to the new host, created a database on the host, amended WP’s config file to point to the database server, database name, username and password, ran the install script and it was done. Well I did make one mistake in that the server was still pointing to localhost but apart from that the critter was up and live in an hour, and that’s a lot quicker than it used to take.

Of course I had to import the original WordPress blogs into the new own-hosted version but at least I didn’t need to convert the files like I had to with Blogspot, but I did need to amend ‘class=alignright’ to ‘class=align-right’ for every entry in each of the exported xml files. Again I used Notepad and search and replace.

I’ve been testing some bulk upload process recently, though I’d been told that one of the versions I was regression testing did work in live (If it worked so well in live then why did you need to regression test it? Ed). There were 5 different data types to be uploaded and none of ‘em worked. Jeez, they didn’t even fail very well. Prior to the actual upload process the files were validated and the validation report was even written to the wrong folder.

We eventually did have a tiny bit of success with one of the data types, provided the data was squeeky clean and there wasn’t much of it. Took ages for even this success and I just put it down to some not too shoddy code that just happened to be lying around in the right place at the right time, got itself invoked, thrashed about a bit and by a miracle managed to update a couple of columns.

That was a few weeks ago and as a result several defects were raised just to get the software into some kind of shape that we could then have another bash at it. Needless to say the very experienced developer didn’t touch ‘em with a barge pole, and along with some words from one of the managers that it works in live, generated so much confusion that instead of testing the bulk upload process with small files and therefore where it was easy to determine some kind of expected results, this lot went big. Erm…lets try an 82mb file. That took 3 hours to validate and load, or fail and then they started looking at any data that had managed to claw its way onto the database. Due to all the time this took they were only getting around 2 runs a day. I left them to it.

Then last week, several weeks later, I was asked to test it again. None of the original defects had been closed, think they just respelt the word ‘defect’ as ‘defekt’ so they’d miss all the defect tracking report filters, they probably thought if you can’t see it then it’s not there or some other gonzoid attempt at logic. I started testing the same old bulk upload processes and waddayaknow…..just the same as before, full of bugs. I gave up after 2 days as there was no point as the software just didn’t work. I did raise eight quite major defects but they got ignored again. The developer just doesn’t fix bugs.

I think this might be the worlds slowest loading blog at the moment, database problem.

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.