Blog migration and consolidation

Posted on by
Reply

Free Food at Drexel

I’ve been blogging for a long time. If you can remember xanga for a moment, that was the first place I wrote down my thoughts… that means I’ve been blogging since 2000, gosh. Since then, I’ve written for many different reasons: fun, work, free food at Drexel. Today is the first day of the great migration and consolidation. My goal is to slowly move each and every blog I’ve owned over the years and archive them here so I can slowly lower my annual cost for domains. And since I needed to learn how to do this, I want to teach you the same.

During it's hayday, we had an up to date calendar that was run by 5 different people. We really were all in on this idea, sometimes to the dismay of the event staff.

During it’s heyday, we had an up to date calendar that was run by 5 different people. We really were all in on this idea, sometimes to the dismay of the event staff.

Free Food At Drexel will be the first blog I’ll be bringing over because it was one of the most successful projects I ever ran. The team consisted of me and 3 classmates and we really had a lot of fun with this project. The writing style and humor might not translate from then to now, nor will a lot of the pictures, but I’m glad to have taken part in it.

User Sigma even found a recent post about our old venture, if you can believe it, demanding that we bring back the website. That’s pretty moving, I appreciate his kind words and I’m glad that we made a difference in the bellies of our readers. In the end, we’ve all moved on and graduated and the project ended. Some quick stats about our venture:

  • we made* $5.60 from ad revenue
  • had 47,062 page views all time
  • had 22 followers
  • published 242 posts

*I lost $60.40 on the whole venture, but the calories we gained were priceless. Maybe one day I’ll carry that loss forward for some tax offsetting (what is the limit, 20 years?), but for now it’s a moot point because I had fun.

How to import a blog

There’s a few things you need to do in order to import a blog. The first thing you need is a source blog, in this case, freefoodatdrexel.blogger.com is my source blog. The more organized the source blog is, the less work you’ll have to do in order to successfully import it. In my case, I went ahead and just imported what I had and decided I would deal with the clean up, rather than do double work.

If your source blog had multiple authors, you’re going to need to create accounts for those authors on your WordPress blog. Since I have a domain name with email addresses, I went ahead and recreated those authors as editors here so I could reassign their old posts.

To grab those posts from blogger, I had to export the blog:

Export a blogger blog

The file that is downloaded is an .xml file and you are going to need that file to import it into your WordPress blog. I went with the default import feature on WordPress, but it wasn’t the cleanest as it didn’t carry over my authors. The import tool is very straight forward and simply asks you to navigate to that .xml file. You’ll have to pick which username from your source blog corresponds to which username on your WordPress blog, which is where I went wrong this first  time. I’ll recreate this in the follow-up post so you can see what it should look like.

Wordpress Import

I decided that this wasn’t a problem for me as I knew that I was going to have to go back to a lot of my older posts and clean out the broken links for images that we “borrowed”. So while cleaning up my old posts, I had to change the author to those newly created “fake” accounts. This was easy however, since changing the author of a post is as simple as clicking “Quick Edit” and selecting their name from the drop down.

Quick Edit

If the username you’re looking for isn’t there, go to your Users page and change their Role to Author.

Edit User Roles

As I was unsure how I wanted my old categories to meld with my existing ones, I decided to use one catch-all for the old blog’s posts and use tags to capture their old categories. If that’s confusing, don’t worry, I was confused too, because when you’re adding 250+ posts of content, you really don’t know what to expect. In the end though, Old Categories -> New Tags and all the old posts being categorized as “free food at drexel” looks like it will give me the best results.

And that’s really it. The actual importing process and cleaning process are really mundane, involve opening every post and deleting the old, broken image links, setting the author and saving.  Once I complete this (hopefully by Friday), I’ll get to work on the highlight reel and maybe we can all share a laugh remembering old times.

Next week, brtw’s cooking blog!

Back into it, what I’ve been up to

Posted on by
Reply

It has been a busy several months.

Let’s see: work on the house has been going along at an amazing pace, kitchen is completely purchased and being assembled, workload at work is still the same but with a little more travel as the company realizes future potentials, cooked and prepared a few interesting things as of late (expect ex-cel-lent recipe updates soon and have a new name!), played some World of Warcraft and then quit again, burned my nerve endings working with ghost peppers, and met some awesome people at Madison Square Garden back in August when League of Legends stopped by.

All that said, the house is still taking up most of my time, but I’m ready to put more effort into developing a blog that’s helpful and maybe even a little educational.

I’d also like to promise a more regularly scheduled… err, posting schedule. I’m going to go with a weekly posting schedule (Wednesdays) for now and ramp up if interest grows.

But what’s the point of a blog post to tell you about blog posts, right? So let’s get some content going…

Ghost Pepper Shenanigans

IMG_3005 IMG_3006

Free Mug Contest! Your best recipe!

Posted on by
Reply

brtw supporter mugs

The mugs that I got on sale from zazzle.com for $7.50 each came in.  You can buy one for twice that through the support me link. I think I get $1 and change on every mug, so I’m not making a killing on them, but I’ll be putting those dollars back into funding the website, maybe I’ll even make a little tracker!

Anyway, I have 3 mugs to give away (one is for my friend’s bday today) and I’m looking to have a contest, or a series of contests, to give them away.

The first contest will be an easy one:
I’m looking for, in exchange for one mug, shipped to your continental US location, your best recipe to be used in exCellent Recipes. The exchange of goods will grant me publishing and ownership rights of your recipe, but only the winning recipe. I’ll be picking one winner from all of the submissions received. This first contest will run until October 16th, so just about 1 month from now. I’ll pick a winner by the 20th of October.

Please make all submissions to recipesformustachemugs@brtw2.com

I ran into you at a coffee shop

Posted on by
Reply

You were in my dream last night. Yes you, you’re the only one reading this right now. I ran into you at a coffee shop as I was walking around the town of small houses whose only road is a small creek with a few foot bridges to traverse. The humidity had gotten to your hair. There are trees here and there along the walk, they hide what’s around the town as best they can. But it was you who I ran into at the coffee shop. You don’t exist in this world, this dream world that exists solely in my mind and no one else’s.

We talked about something for a while, what it was I will never know, I never pay attention to conversations in my dreams anymore. You were the first to notice the mayhem outside, the first to grab me and pull me towards the door. Everyone was running, we were running, I never run. You reach the convertible first and I yell at you to start the engine. I tripped over the car, it was after all a small car in the town of small houses without a road, and fought to get myself to drive. I drove, fast and reckless for once, not smooth and steady until the road usually gives out under me and I plummet into the next level of a dream.

You disappeared when I reached what the trees that hide whats around the town and I lost the road to the river that’s always spilled its banks as it rolls towards the waterfall that leads into the town around sea world. This car would have survived that waterfall, it was small, lightweight, blue. But I lost it in the woods. The woods couldn’t hold onto me though, even though they sometimes do. I found the middle school.

The middle school’s left wing was open, much like the high school’s and college’s left wings. I blame only myself for creating this part of the world with what I had written when I was younger about the hall to the left, the statues that move, begging for your help.  I suppose I didn’t so much as find the middle school as I found the tree that leads to the basement in the middle schoool. I found its long tunnel that leads to a room with no exit, the one where the piles of garbage overflow from a hole in the ceiling through which I finally escaped. I never made it to the main foyer from the left hall, I ran into some people doing karate. They challenged me, but I ran, I didn’t feel like exerting myself in a dream, idiots.  I opened the door, but I didn’t get to see this through to the end though, because I remembered you. You were in the woods.