I can has loose toof and uvver noos

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(I’m posting this to all categories / feeds so that subscribers to each can see where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing and, can drop in to see the new blog is open for business.)

On a routine inspection and rabies jab up the bum (well, in his neck) to renew his passport on Wednesday, we found that poor Balu (here seen looking fairly miserable) has a loose toof - one of his fangs - that’s infected.

Can we get an ahhhhhh here?

He probably has tooth ache too, but miraculously, hasn’t complained.

Not that you’d notice what “complaining” was with him, because he’s a demanding child anyway, but the fat little urchin has been demanding and eating his food, which I tend to think he would not if the pain were that acute and, consequently, I hadn’t noticed the problem. I’m a bad mother!

So after five days of antibiotics we have to make an appointment to go back to the vet to clean up his gob and possibly remove the offending fang. Goodness knows what this is going to cost: the “routine” annual jabs cost 100 euros already, plus another 60 euros for transport to the vet and back each time.

Maybe if I don’t eat for 3-4 months, we’ll be able to manage this?

Meanwhile, I have defrosted Wordpress and installed the freezer.

Er, maybe that was the other way around, but I tell you I was getting so confused by the end of it that it could well have been vice-versa.

Moving large / old / multiple blogs from Blogger to Wordpress

When Blogger made Beta/New Blogger compulsory, it effectively stopped working for those of us who hosted large blogs on our own hosting. We had to stick with the old Templates and couldn’t use the widget-based Layouts. Not an issue in itself, but the combination meant that blogs would “not” update, posts would “not” post and when they did, they hung a browser and took hours over it.

This is hardly acceptable at any time, but with time becoming more of an issue for me, procrastinating became more painful than getting on with it.

A word of advice: If you toy with the idea of moving from Blogger to Wordpress, do it sooner rather than later. Do not try to move and combine 4 blogs that have an aggregate total of over 4,400 posts, unless you’re stark raving bonkers.

Oh, it can be done. It just wasn’t going to transfer the straightforward way - which I didn’t really expect it to do - and I could have saved myself days of work if I’d not put this off for years waiting to get an elusive “round tuit.”

Other than that, nobody is ever going to have a mess as convoluted as the one I’d made myself, so no matter what your situation, if you apply yourself …

Read lots of posts (below) on how to move from Blogger to Wordpress:

Top 5 Reasons: Converting Blog From Blogger to Wordpress
Top 3 Problems on Importing Blogger To Wordpress
Move From Blogger To Wordpress and Maintain Permalinks And Traffic
Import blog from Blogger.com into WordPress - Free your blog with freedom
Blogger Sucks. Wanna Move to WordPress? : The Blog Herald
Move Your Blogs from Blogger to WordPress The Easy Way - Digital Inspiration
Import Blogger Posts & Comments to Wordpress Easily
Importing Content « WordPress Codex
Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices
Migrating New Blogger to WordPress 2 » TechCorner
12 Steps To Convert Your Blog From Blogger To Wordpress

(Yes, ominously, it gets a 12-Step plan! And remember things can change for reasons beyond the control of either myself, the writers of these posts or the Wordpress developers. Your mileage may vary. Batteries not included, etc.)

… I learned that after installing Wordpress (that was easy, my web host has an easy installer), I should be able to import the posts after first converting my self-hosted Blogger-driven blogs (copy #1) into Blogspot blogs (copy #2).

That I did, but was the easy part over, however!

Because, the permission to import from Blogspot to my self-hosted Wordpress installation just would not work. So, I had the bright idea to try to import the Blogspot blogs to my Wordpress.com account. That worked (copy #3).

All four blogs were now combined and the whole exported from there.

That exported file should then, in theory, import into the self-hosted Wordpress (copy #4) and it did, but it only accepts files of up to a certain size (2m whatever that is). I’m guessing here, because I kept it to around 200-300 posts, though from one or two clues I’ve read, I think it might manage 500.

All I know was that it wasn’t having a file with over 4,000 posts.

WARNING: Do not try this at home children!

So what I did next was to open the Wordpress.com export file in a text editor and study the code. After determining what were opening and closing bits of code that needed to be at the top and bottom and, what constituted the record for each post, I then set about systematically and manually chopping this file into about 20 odd parts (of about 200 posts / 5,000 lines each).

These separate files then imported into the self-hosted Wordpress without problem, except it was as boring and repetitive as factory piece work!

And I will reiterate that you have to be VERY VERY VERY careful where you cut, snip and prune this file to maintain your data integrity. Maybe it’s not brain surgery, but I think it would be easy to perform a painful castration!

Finally, after having created this mess, we also now needed to clean up.

The original self-hosted Blogger blogs (copy #1) were easy enough to delete off the server, wholesale. It was also simple to delete the newly created Blogspot blogs (copy #2), by deleting those from my Blogger account. The posts in my Wordpress.com account (copy #3) may have to be done the same way, otherwise deleting posts one-by-one might take until Christmas!

Aside: Yes, someone had to notice and question the “duplicate” posts, well, tough s… Of course, I was concerned about that from the search perspective, but as far as I’m concerned the job itself is a VALID reason for it. These duplications are not remaining online now the task is complete.

The plan, once the old files were removed, was to move the Wordpress installation over to the directory where my personal blog had lived before, placing the blog’s front page in the root directory. This would have preserved some of the old URLS. Following the instructions carefully, however, only results in 500 Internal Server Errors, so clearly this is an issue that needs looking into.

Next on the agenda (partially completed):

• Try to un-break the 404’s that wouldn’t be broke if the above worked.

• Try not to break it too much with each widget / plugin I play with.

• Do a bit better with the design / aesthetic customization.

• Re-Embedify YouTube videos that don’t transfer intact.

• Comment links have not survived the ordeal. This can’t be fixed.

• And then there’s a huge legacy of broken links and images that I have caused myself through this gradual moving and consolidation process. Que sera.

Those, if I can pluck up the courage, might probably be fixed by editing the MySQL database directly. Only maybe though, because that’s not the sort of thing I feel I should be doing without an adult present!

Eventually, I’m hoping that easier management, less fiddling with broken tools and more features available, particularly not having to hang around for ages with my browser “hung” on a non-updating Blogger blog, might mean that I have time to make posts that may actually be interesting or useful to you.

(No, you can’t have both at once and don’t actually bank on either!)

Then I aim to do it all over again, combining two more Blogger blogs (with an aggregate of over 3,000 posts) into another Wordpress installation.

Cat has a loose tooth. To contemplate this, I may have a loose screw!

One last note: Don’t share the mussels that you defrosted from the freezer with the cat - it only results in a 500 Internal Kitty Error - unless you actually enjoy mopping barf off the floors!