Posted by Bryan | Posted on 25-04-2010
Category : WordPress
Tags: blog, blogger, import, wordpress
I recently had a client who, for some reason, had a website that was composed of a static set of pages, a Blogger site that was set up to publish to the original site via FTP and there were two separate Blogger blogs set up for specific posts that should simply have been categories.
Importing posts from the two standard Blogger sites was easy. Just visit your WordPress dashboard, select Tools>Import. Next choose Blogger. You will be prompted to enter your Google credentials so that your WordPress install can communicate directly with your Blogger account. Your blogs will show up on a page, displaying the number of posts and comments in each one. Beside each blog name will be a “Magic Button” that will import everything into WordPress. You can set the author of these posts to existing WordPress users at this time.
The problem I had was that one of the Blogger blogs was set to publish to a directory on the client’s web server and the WordPress Importer could not handle this circumstance. So for this blog, I had to log into the Blogger account, go to the settings for the blog in question, then Export the posts as an XML file.
I found a link on a WordPress support page to a blogger2wordpress conversion tool that will accept the Blogger XML file and produce a WordPress WXR file for you to download. Now you can simply return to your WordPress Dashboard, go to Tools>Import then select WordPress. Click on the Choose File button and select the WXR file that was created by the blogger2wordpress tool.
For the second time, I was able to attend An Event Apart, a great “two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design.” The conference was founded by, and includes presentations by, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman. Both have authored essential books for any bookshelf sitting beside someone who works on Web sites.
This year’s AEA in Seattle was held at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. This was a very hospitable venue on Seattle’s waterfront, between the cruise terminal and Anthony’s Pier 66 restaurant.
There was a fantastic mix of web standards advocates, user experience gurus and content specialists at this year’s conference. Some of the highlights for me was the form design session by Luke Wroblewski, the passionate presentation by Kristina Halvorson on the need for a web content strategy and Dan Cederholm‘s presentation on why you shouldn’t worry about making sites look EXACTLY the same in all browsers.
Posted by Bryan | Posted on 30-03-2009
Category : WebDev, WordPress
This is a short post to test whether or not I correctly spliced this bit.ly PHP code into the Twitme WordPress plugin I am using. If it works, I’ll expand on this post later.
UPDATE: Well, it seems to work. I basically just copied the code from James Cridland and replaced the TimesURL class that Twitme was using.
I was surprised to get a comment this morning from Johnny Mast saying he was going to use the Cridland code in Twitme 1.6.9.3 which just came out today. This would have happened without my help, but I feel like I had at least a bit part in this taking place.
Check out Twitme!
Posted by Bryan | Posted on 28-01-2009
Category : WordPress
I just installed an update to the Multi-level Navigation Plugin for WordPress on one of my sites and was briefly confused when only one page was showing up in the menu. Turns out the page I had set to ‘exclude’ got switched to ‘include’ so it was only displaying the page I wanted to be left off of the menu.
Easy fix. Just go to your Dashboard and select Settings>Multi-level Navigation Plugin. Under the Menu Contents page, scroll down to the Modifications section. Just review your settings where it says ‘Pages to include or exclude in the main menu’. I just had to change the dropdown from ‘include’ to ‘exclude’.
Posted by Bryan | Posted on 19-11-2008
Category : WebDev
Tags: Hacking, Handy, Jaquith, Navigation, Plugin, Widget, wordpress
I just found a handy WordPress plugin that I have been pining for. It’s called Page Links To. This plugin allows you to add a link to a URL outside of the WordPress managed site structure, and have it show up in your navigation without hacking the Pages widget or template. The new link will show up anywhere the wp_list_pages(); function is used.
Once installed, the process is very simple. Create a new Page. Enter the desired link name in the Title field. Then, in the newly added Page Links To field, enter the URL that the new Page link should go.
I used this on a 2.7-beta3 install of WordPress.
WordPress Plugin: Page Links To by Mark Jaquith
Posted by Bryan | Posted on 04-09-2008
Category : Tech, WebDev
Tags: browser, ie, ie6, internetexploder
It confounds me that people will not upgrade software when it is free. As long as sites are hacked for backwards compatibility, ie users will not see the need to upgrade. I hope more people stop supporting ie6.
This quote really puts some perspective on the problem:
Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.
IE Death March.
Posted by Bryan | Posted on 30-04-2008
Category : Travel, WebDev
Tags: conference webdesign
I attended An Event Apart New Orleans last week. It was a great opportunity to listen to some of the individuals who have made, and continue to make, the web a better place.
One of the most memorable moments for me was when Andy Clarke discussed how all of my past comic book reading could be applied to create an appealing and effective user experience on the web. He used examples from Watchmen and Concrete to illustrate how the proper use of visual elements can tell a story with minimum use of text.
The “headliners”, Jefferey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, were inspiring and thought-provoking. I have seen them before, and if you are in the web design field you better know their work.
