Just in case anyone in the world (aside from me) is interested, I’ve added a page titled ‘Zeitgeist’ (the link is in the tab-bar at the top of the page). You might be familiar with Google’s “Zeitgeist”. Well, this is the same concept, it displays a tag cloud of random search terms which have led folks to my blog.
Right now it’s a bit sparse, but that will change as the database populates, ultimately displaying 100 random search terms.
I know I’m not the only one who finds this sort of thing fascinating; Zeitgeist was written by “Whooami” at village-idiot.org, so that apparently makes at least two of us.
…If they’ve been wanting to convert to WordPress, that is. WordPress 2.2 just came out, and among other improvements, it now features:
A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
I’m not complaining, but I do wish this has happened before I wound up seeking out a PHP script to do the deed. I’m sure the built-in importer is vastly simpler and much more streamlined.
If you’ve forgotten (or missed them the first time around) here are some posts detailing my frustrating first (failed) attempt at making the switch:
And then, succeeding:
Somehow when publishing my previous post, I inadvertently set the post status to “private”. While I was logged in to WordPress and looking at the blog everything seemed fine. It wasn’t until just a bit ago when I pulled up the blog on my laptop that I discovered that my last post wasn’t showing up. A few minutes of head-scratching later I found the problem and fixed it.
Duh!
Using the previously mentioned plugins, I have handily won this round against the spammers. Since I installed it just over 24 hours ago Bad Behavior has blocked 50 attempts by spam-bots and such to access the site. Meanwhile, Akismet has only had to deflect 1 ’spamment’, rather than the 100+ I’ve been seeing every day for weeks now. Victory is mine! For now, anyway.
It will be interesting to see how much of an impact keeping out the bad bots will have on my server load.
Hooray me!
Boooo! Spamming scum and your robot minions. Boooo!
Evidently, I’m under siege. Less than two weeks ago, I noted to myself that Akismet had blocked 200 spam comments since I converted the blog to WordPress (two and a half months ago). As I write this it is telling me:
Akismet has caught 1,626 spam for you since you first installed it.
That means that I’m now getting more than 100 spam comments per day! Thankfully, Akismet blocks these comments before they appear on the blog, but I still feel compelled to look them over, just in case a legitimate comment has somehow been flagged (so far, none have). As you can imagine, this is a bit of an ass-pain, so I’m now incrementally raising my defenses, hopeful of reducing the amount of ’spamments’ which are generated in the first place. The first phase of my plan was to install the Comment Timeout plugin which
automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time.
Right now that ‘period of time’ is set at 60 days. This should vastly diminish the volume of ’spamments’. Fewer targets: Less spam.
I’ve also installed Bad Behavior which should keep the spam-bots from getting in in the first place.
I’m crossing my fingers.
Oviously.
Everything seems to be working fairly well. There are some formatting issues with IE, I’ve discovered. Shoulda tested first, but I never use it; I’m all Firefox, all the time! I’m sure some internal links got munged in the conversion process, so I’ll be hunting those down as I go.
If you see anything that seems broken, messed up, or just plain weird; please let me know (and be sure to tell me what browser and OS you’re using).
So, I found a script which will allow me to import the blog into WordPress. So over the next few days things may look a bit weird around here as I settle in.
Hopefully by week’s end, I will have everything switched over.
Once more, wish me luck!
So the Blogger beta finally became available to those of us posting via FTP and I decided to “upgrade”. Unfortunately, I realized too late that all of Blogger’s new “functionality” is strictly geared toward those posting to blogspot accounts and is actually more of a liability for those of us with blogs hosted elsewhere. I won’t go into the reasons why; suffice it to say they are manifold.
The worse news? There’s no way to go back.
So, now I’m looking at converting the entire blog to WordPress. I’m positive that this will be a Good Thing™ in the long run, but I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out how to import my posts while keeping all the URL’s the same; thus ensuring that all the links (internal and external) will still work.
So, anyway, if I don’t update for awhile, or things get all screwy-looking; that’s probably why. I’m hoping to make the switch sometime during the upcoming week, or at least make serious progress in that direction.
Wish me luck!
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