Rick's Rants » Website

Evernote Site Memory Button

Rick Lobrecht — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:56:50 +0000

A while ago, Evernote announced their new Site Memory function. It allows content publishers to control how their content is saved into Evernote. I’ve enabled Site Memory on this site using the awesome plugin Slocum Design Studio shared.

Do you want to try it? Just find the Evernote icon following each post, and click it. If you don’t have an account, the pop-up will allow you to create one. Go ahead, it’s free (although there is a premium service available.)

dasBlog to WordPress migration

Rick Lobrecht — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:46:46 +0000

I had a couple of false starts (that’s what happens when you don’t really plan things) but I’ve not gotten almost everything up and running.

I first started by trying to bring in my RSS feed from dasBlog. This was a huge pain, but did end up working. The only bad thing is I didn’t have a good way to map my old URLs to my new posts, and each RSS item had an aggregator bug in it. I then started searching for some better options. It turns out a bunch of people have done this before. Below is a quick run through of the tools I used.

I used the dasBlog to BlogML convertor from MSDN to create a single XML file of all my dasBlog content.

I then used the BlogML Importer to bring the content in. This does a really great job of giving you a map of your old URLs to your new ones.

This map combined with the Redirection plug-in let me save a large chunk of the URLs from my old site. Unfortunately, I was left with a bunch of GUID based CommentView URLs, which amazingly enough are getting a ton of traffic. I searched and searched, and didn’t come up with anyone who had solved this nicely. I knew that my dasBlog Google sitemap contained both sets of URLs, so I started playing around with that file. Luckily dasBlog put the two URLs together in the file, and Excel was able to import the XML into a spreadsheet. I ended up being able to generate a similar map containing old GUID based CommentView URLs with my new WordPress permalinks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that file to import into Redirection. (I think the problem is with the commas in the CommentView URLs.) After playing around way too much, I ended up loading the table directly. This worked really good.

The last step was to create redirections for the day pages and the Category pages. Here’s the regex for those:
^/rick/CategoryView,category,(.*)\.aspx$

http://blog.lobrecht.com/rick/category/$1/

/(?i)rick/default,date,(\d*)-(\d*)-(\d*)\.aspx

http://blog.lobrecht.com/rick/$1/$2/$3

I might have been able to do this a little more elegantly, but it seems to work. I also need to set up a few manual redirects for the Categories I have with spaces in the names.

Let me know if you find any issues with the new site.

Let’s try this again

Rick Lobrecht — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:26:02 +0000

I’ve migrated my blog from a self-hosted dasBlog (on our home based server) to a WordPress based site on our webhost. I’ve re-migrated all my previous content, and set up redirects for all the individual articles. I’m working on the rest of the redirects.

My apologies

Rick Lobrecht — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:46:45 +0000

If you’re subscribed to my feeds, I’m sorry about all the old postings. I’m contemplating a move from dasBlog to something else, and I cranked up the number of entries in order to get my content out.

Updated styles

Rick Lobrecht — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:57:30 +0000

You may have noticed that we updated our front page and gallery to use a new style. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you may also notice how ugly it is. Actually, that’s just for you. It’s nice and pleasing in a modern, standards compliant browser. Why don’t you download Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and start surfing the web in style.

Oh, you’re stuck in IE. I’m going to try some CSS hacks to see if I can make the site look a little better.

We’ll be updating this section soon, but we need to pick a new blog platform first.

Finally

Rick Lobrecht — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:51:23 +0000

I finally updated the front page of our site. It’s been almost two years since doing that the last time. Oops.

IT issues

Rick Lobrecht — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:50:31 +0000

I attempted an upgrade of our servers (due to a hardware replacement) and it didn’t go according to plan. We’re finally now (mostly) up and running. If you sent us email and we haven’t responded, there’s a good chance we didn’t get it, and you need to send it again.

Hurricane Ike

Rick Lobrecht — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:46:02 +0000

Things are starting to resemble normalcy for us. Email and blog are back up. If you sent us important emails, we may not have gotten them, so please resend.

New pictures posted

Rick Lobrecht — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:31:23 +0000

It’s been over a month since we’ve posted any new pictures, until yesterday. Check out the new photos in our gallery. We should be posting a bunch more with school starting tomorrow.

Website Updates

Rick Lobrecht — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:09:14 +0000

Just in case you’re not following along, we’ve posted 29 new photo albums since February 1. We’re also now hosting the photo gallery for Trey’s Cub Scout Pack.