Greg In The Desert

At the end of last year Google did something with its page rank algorithm that caused my site to loose most traffic from Google. I thought the problem was due to excessive load times on my site. I used Pingdom to narrow the load times to a javascirpt from a Wordpress contact form plugin. The javascript took about 4 seconds to load and was loading on every page, including pages that did not have the contact form.

Once disabled the load times were down to a more reasonable level, although they have crept back up according to Google Webmaster Tools. As far as I can tell it’s images causing the load times. It was a good exercise for me to understand load times but it was a change made completely on Google’s part that caused the loss in traffic. The site not only got the traffic back but it increased a little. Also, when the traffic did come back the site had a significant increase in comment spam, so much that I had to turn off comments for certain posts.

Meanwhile, I took a much need break from the blog and completely ignored everything (except approving comments) and missed that TechCrunch linked to one of my pages. Causing a nice spike in traffic.

Truth Or Consequences, NM blogger Mikey Sklar came up with a metal bowl and Alfa WiFi adapter
to scan for an open wireless networks when his internet went out.

We suffered from two disastrous outages last week. First a data line was cut somewhere north of TorC and south of Albuquerque. We had no cell service (AT&T) or any internet in all of town for a full work day. Nobody could use credit cards, ATMs, or even purchase gas. This was closely followed with our home internet connection dying. I called the cable company on day 3 to complain and they fixed it almost immediately. The issue was a dead amplifier used to boost the signal to all the trailer hookups on our property. In order to keep our sanity through this week of dead connections I rigged up a 1W Wi-Fi card to pickup the free internet signal in a nearby park about a 1/3 of a mile from my home. I was blown away to discover 50 other Wi-Fi networks being available at the same time. About 50% of those are open or using easily defeated WEP. I highly recommend picking up a 1W alfa card for less than $40. Now I just need a bigger dish. Works fine with all platforms and has a recent driver release for OS/X which makes it much easier to use.

I started this blog in the summer of 2003 using iBlog for Mac and hosting using .mac. Eventually iBlog used Haloscan for comments and eventually iBlog died (technically it’s still available but it’s been at version 2.0 release candidate 3 for years). I have since moved this blog to Blosxom, RapidWeaver and finally Wordpress and changed the name three times.

I was able to transfer all of the posts generated from the other blogging systems into Wordpress through (mostly) automated methods. Using Applescript I was able to parse the contents of the rendered HTML files and exported to a text file that Wordpress could import.

I evaluated the various formats that Wordpress supports, including the wordpress WXR format but found the Movable Type Import Format the easiest to work with.

Getting the 1,100 plus comments from Haloscan proved to be more difficult. Haloscan does offer a XML export of comments, which required an inexpensive paid membership to access. Wordpress does not offer a Haloscan XML importer so I converted the XML file to the Movable Type Import Format using applescript.

Applescript has a XML parser built in but I found the XML parser to have difficulties working with the Haloscan XML file. Adding to the problem is that I started working on this about three operating systems ago in which Applescript has seen several changes. I stuck with a sort of brute force method of looping and parsing through each line of the content.

The script loops through each entry and outputs a dummy thread with no contents expect the title and includes the comment thread at the end. The Movable Type Import Format includes a NO ENTRY: 1 switch to signifiy this, but I’m not sure if Wordpress really needs it.

TITLE: AMREP Has Record Quarter
NO ENTRY: 1
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Johnny
EMAIL: XXXXXXX
URL: xxxxxxx
IP: xxxxxx
DATE: 09/14/2006 6:56:06 PM
It will slow eventually.  Everything in CA and AZ is plummeting and the west side is already over built and under occupied.
-----
--------

When Wordpress imports the Movable Type Import Format it looks for a matching post title that already exists. If Wordpress finds a matching post it adds the comments to the entry. If it doesn’t exist then Wordpress creates a new entry as a draft with the comments attached.

To make matters worse iBlog identified comment threads using a serial number like E554707186, Blossom identified comments using the title of the post with underscores and punctuation removed and rapid weaver used identified comment threads using a unique identifier like rw_unique_entry_id_403_page0. Most of my comments had post titles like these, except for a few that were generated by Bloxsom. I also had the added difficulty of my Haloscan XML file containing comments for two blogs.

I had considered writing a Applescript that could deterimne the real post title by reading through my website archives. That was going to take even more time so I decided to just import into Wordpress the way it was and manually move comments around from the newly created “dummy posts”.

Wordpress doesn’t have a built in capability to move comments to another post. For that I used the Restore Post Id plug in so I could identify post ids, WP Move Comments plugin to move individual comments and Simple Move Comments plugin to move all comments under a single post at once. I disabled the Subscribe To Comments plugin to avoid spamming the comments every time I moved a comment, but I’m not sure if that would have happened.

It was a good process for me as I got to delete comments that didn’t have any relevance and it allowed me to clean up and delete some posts. For one or two comments it was easier to move them one at a time, for posts with more comments I used the Simple Move Comments plugin which moved them all at once.

It’s a good time for users of Haloscan to consider doing something with their comments. Haloscan is discontinuing their free service and replacing it with a paid Echo service. For those that don’t upgrade, their comments will be deleted. The good news is Haloscan comments can be exported for free. On 14 December I received the following email from Haloscan

Exciting news, as we’ve mentioned on our blog, Haloscan, the legacy comment system that JS-Kit acquired last year, is getting upgraded to the new Echo platform.

You are receiving this email because, according to our records, you are (or have been) a Haloscan user.

This transition will happen in batches of users over the course of a couple of months. You are in the current batch!

We encourage you to log into your Haloscan admin dashboard right away. You will be presented with 2 options.

Upgrade to Echo for $9.95/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically.
Export your Haloscan comment data for free and turn off their service
Please make sure you make a selection within the next two weeks to ensure uninterrupted service.

A bonus iPhone app of the week is released by AT&T. The app lets the user provide feedback to AT&T, dropped calls, voice quality and etc, along with GPS coordinates.

AT&T Mark the Spot is free from the iTunes App Store.

AT&T Mark the Spot is an application that provides customers a means to provide feedback on network user experience to AT&T.

Features

- Simplicity of operation
- Submit a real time report capturing local GPS coordinates at time and place of event
- Submit a report after the fact when a customer is not at the place of event
- Submit a report of dropped call, failed call, lack of coverage, data service failure, or poor voice quality
- Submit optional specific comments about an event
- Receive an SMS acknowledgement that the reported event was sent and received successfully

AT&T is committed to providing its customers with the best network experience possible.

This application will help contribute towards this goal and its utilization is greatly appreciated.

A friend received a phone call from a scammer. The phone call sounds just like a number of email phishing scams I receive although I have never heard of them on the phone. Here is an account of the phone conversation.

I answered the phone and a person with a indian accent said I had a cashiers check for somewhere around 3 or 30 million dollars, it was difficult to understand with his accent. He said he was from the US Treasury Department. He also said I had a 2010 Mercedes waiting for me and it was already insured with Global American.

I asked him how I get it and he said he needed my address or he could wire the money to me. I told him no thanks and hung up.

The only time my friend answered was from the phone number 876-454-2568 but they had two other attempts from 876-835-3966 and 876-446-2966 which we also think were from the same scammers.

It it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Government agencies don’t cold call people to tell them they have money. My friend will be reporting this to the FTC for whatever good that will do.

As I try to get back into posting interesting iPhone applications, I am still surprised at the amount of crap that is available to the iPhone store. Mac users always complained that sure, Windows has a more software available to it but most of it is crap. I think that is true with the iPhone.

The Wordpress App is not one of those crap applications (that is, is you have a Wordpress installation you can use it with). I’m not sure why they created an all new iTunes entry for the 2.0 app when both the 1.0 and 2.0 apps are free.

Although I find the iPhone to difficult to write entire blog posts on, the Wordpress app is great for creating basic drafts that get me started, fixing existing posts and managing comments.

Wordpress 2 is available on the iTunes store for free.

WordPress 2 is the only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress, users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.

What’s new in version 2.0:

- A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
- Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
- New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
- Passwords are now stored in the keychain
- Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
- Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
- Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
- Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
- Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
- Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
- Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

For support, please visit our forums at http://iphone.forums.wordpress.org — we aren’t able to respond to support requests submitted in an iTunes review.

After Newsgater totally screwed up NetNewsWire with the last release I have started using Google Reader’s web based interface (and ByLine on the iPhone) for RSS reading. I would love to use a desktop app for reading RSS feeds on my Mac but other than the now banned NetNewsWire, none of the other Google Reader compatible applications are stable.

That leaves me with the web interface in which I have a love hate relationship. I now how two more reason to love Google reader since they added an Explore section and a Personalized ranking.

The personalized ranking has done a pretty good job of pulling out the most interesting items from the several hundred subscriptions I have. When I run out of my own feeds to read (often known as reaching the end of the internet), google can show me the most popular feeds from everyone else’s feed and suggest other feeds.

James at weblogtoolscollection.com is looking for Wordpress plugin ideas. I suggested a Haloscan comment importer.

The Albuquerque Police make it to Fail Blog.

How convenient that MacWorld reviewed 8 online backup services for Mac. Perfect timing for me since I just dumped Mozy, my online backup service since fall of 2007.

Since using Mozy, I rarely have had to restore files. When I have it hasn’t been an issue, until recently. It was the end of July 2009 that I needed to restore a file. It took until the end of August 2009 that I was finally able to restore the file from their web based interface but could never get the native Mac restore application to work properly.

MacWorld’s review of Mozy mostly agrees with me.

PROS
Terrific initial backup selection set; simple approach for basic use.
CONS
Controls and status windows are split into too many pieces; restore software failed on one computer; backup halted due to bugs for four weeks on one computer (fixed in a subsequent release).

My next pick, which I have been testing locally for several months, is CrashPlan. It’s also MacWorld’s pick. I like it when MacWorld agrees with me.

What I like about CrashPlan is it lets you back up to your own server for free and has an inexpensive family plan.

CrashPlan has worked great until I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6. The non Mac OS X 10.6 version of CrashPlan caused my Mac to freeze. Reasonable enough I tried to upgrade to the Snow Leopard approved version. The CrashPlan installer fails to install the application citing errors of an unknown kind: “There were errors with the installation. You may want to try installing again” and “The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance”.

At the moment I am without a offsite backup option. Hopefully CrashPlan responds to my support issues.