Michael Gracie

Technology, Finance, and Time Spent On or In the Water

Bring Blogger images into WordPress, the hard way

Leave a Comment

You migrate from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress. Your posts move over just fine, but for some reason (or another) your images forget their bus pass. Those pornographic stupid cat, hastily-prepared food, and trying-to-make-people-think-you-are-wealthy-instead-of-deep-in-debt vacation photos still show on the new site as they are properly referenced in the posts, but they actually remain on Google’s servers. You (or your client) don’t like that.

Meanwhile, the two plugins you found to solve this problem, Archive Remote Images and Cache Images, haven’t been updated in years. You take your chances anyway because you are lazy (if it is a personal site), or consistently over-promise and under-deliver (due to the impossibility of getting real work done at coffee shops). Either way, you must now hope you made a full site and database backup beforehand. If you did, you’re solution is now staring you in the face.

The script I concocted (shown after the jump) will get you a folder full of those images – with clean and pretty naming conventions – that you can upload to your wp-content directory, along with a SQL script to update links in your WordPress posts. Said programmatic wizardry dirty hack is written in Python – debugged using version 3.5.2 Anaconda custom (x86_64) on macOS 10.12.3 to be precise – and does rely on some SQL prep work. If you do not know Python, SQL and how to navigate directories while a terminal prompt blinks back, you have two choices: Google it (after determining what the definition of “it” is), or inquire about retaining me to do your work for you.

I’ll make the decision whether to continue easy too; if you cannot execute the following block of code sans assistance you are officially deemed “without paddle” …

SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_content` LIKE "%blogspot%"
INTO OUTFILE '/home/dump/blogspotposts.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'

That look easy? Then proceed.

[Read more…]

Self-reliance is nobody’s fault but my own

1 Comment

Just over a year ago I installed an OpenID provider on this site, and have been using the URL here ever since to harass and harangue other blogging types (mostly fishy ones).

Unfortunately, several months back I did some behind the scenes changes. They were merely back-office tweaks, since as you all know the theme/style here is already the most artistic, creative…heck downright gorgeous hunk of web design anywhere on the interwebs. Sadly my flair for technicolor wowza does not extend to my left-brain, and OpenID provision went bust.

At first I pointed fingers at Blogger, and took those I regularly denigrate there to task. But after significant amounts of research and tinkering, I now realize that it is the technology within causing the problems.

I make no apologies, primarily because I know certain denizens of the tubes have expressed sighs of relief during this otherwise difficult period. They are undoubtedly thanking me for my ineptitude. But someday near I will make reparations – I vow that the cynical, ill-humored, irritable commentary certain folks have previously accepted while cussing under their breath will resume.

MG signing off (while Alex, Kyle, Jean-Paul and others tremble in their boots)

Blogger service hit by need for a patch

Leave a Comment

CIO News Alerts noted Google’s Blogger service was hit by an outage.

Yea, Google’s blog was hacked, and someone posted a message that they had to remove. Now living in the world of free software, they say shit happens (and it happens a lot). So every now and then you need to patch stuff – I suspect that was what Google was doing, so it didn’t happen again.

But, to the outside world it is big news, an outage. Bloggers loose perspective:

Mark Nolan began using Blogger to host a personal blog about soccer about two months ago, and is disappointed with the platform’s reliability so far. “This isn’t what you’d expect from an operation like Google. It’s embarrassing in my opinion,” Nolan said in a phone interview.

If the availability problems persist on Blogger, Nolan will consider switching the blog to another platform.

Nolan, who lives in Manchester, United Kingdom, and posts under the pseudonym James Ryddel in the soccer blog, hosts other websites he publishes with British providers.

Although all hosting providers experience downtime, the Blogger situation is reaching unacceptable levels, said Nolan, who works as director of TXT Media. “Google should concentrate on improving Blogger’s reliability and not on adding new features,” Nolan said.

I say Google should start concentrating all right – on specifically charging Mr. Nolan hard currency for use of their service.

Blogger is still going…

2 Comments

but how about the spam? I haven’t seen much in the way blog spam coming from Blogspot as of late. Chris Pirillo was screaming bloody murder about it a few months back, as were other high-profile types.

What happened to Google’s splogs? Did someone put the breaks on it, or is everyone still having a problem with it (and it just so happened to be the sensationalist news of the day)?
[Read more…]

Blogger takes action

According to Mark Cuban, Google has finally responded to their splog problem. They added word verification to new blogs and blog posts. This means no more automation.

I have two things to say about this: 1) Thanks Google, and 2) interesting how folks move, even big ones like Google, when some multi-billionaire is screaming bloody murder.

***UPDATE***

I may have screwed this one up, as I have been told Google has had the “captcha” in place for a while. If so, then how did the splog bot hit them?

Is Google Becoming A Central Theme in Spam Wars?

1 Comment

I came across this post from A Whole Lotta Nothing, which struck a familiar cord: Blogspot is hurting America. Well, I am not sure how much it is “hurting America”, but it certainly seems like it could be hurting bloggers.

Is the Blogger product really being used by spammers to game Google search results? Does Google know this is going on, and if so, are they doing anything about it? They are in the same building, aren’t they?

Seems like a simple solution could work as follows…
[Read more…]