Wohill - Creative design and development

Importing comments to Wordpress

Niklas Waller — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:47 +0000

As mentioned before, we are in the process of evaluating Wordpress as a candidate for our future blogging platform. This evaluation includes importing all information from the current blog to the possibly new one.

Wordpress offers several ways to import data from another system. There are plugins for the major blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and Wordpress that can be found in the Wordpress admin under Tools - Import. You can also search for importer or import to find more plugins.

Since Wohill is not put on any of these blogging platforms but instead is self-developed we can not use any of these plugins. However, there is a tool that can be found in the same place that allows importing from an RSS-feed. Since Wohill has a validated RSS-feed, this is what I have used. Worth mentioning is that I have downloaded Wordpress which means that data tables are created in the same database as the one we use today. What I want said by that is that it is possible to copy data from the old data tables to the new ones without the RSS-importer. But since it exists and importer it is easier and we will use it.

It worked fine. The basic information gets in there. I had problems with the author though. I tried using the author-tag and the dc:creator-tag but neither worked. This was however solved by manually setting the author using SQL-queries in PHPMyAdmin after the import.

The RSS-import only imports posts and we still have comments, tags etc. to take care of and I don't want to add them manually. There might be a plugin that works for this as well but I solved it this way to get the comments in and associated with the right posts.

Since the data tables from the current and the new platform resides in the same database we can use some SQL to fix this. I used the following to copy the comments from the old comments table to the new.

# Insert comments INSERT INTO wp_comments (comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_content, comment_date, comment_post_ID, comment_approved) SELECT a.name, a.email, a.website, a.body, a.publishDate, b.ID, '1' FROM old_comments_table a inner join wp_posts b on (a.postId = b.guid and a.approved = '1')

The comments get in there and also associated with the right posts. The comment count on the posts has not been adjusted though. I searched the web and found a solution for this. Use this code straight off as it is and this issue will be taken care of as well.

# Update comment count on existing posts UPDATE wp_posts wpp LEFT JOIN (SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments  WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id SET wpp.comment_count=wpc.cnt WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')       AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL));

Magic surfer

Randolph Guy — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:02:05 +0000

A cool surfer - with the right look in ink - just a few simple lines to give you the ”Magic Surfer”. He lives his life at the beach on the waves – it runs in his blood. Just a regular dude enjoying the wonders of the world…

Surfing! I like both wave and windsurfing. Not too good at either of them... but I sure enjoy them!

I have been out trying my new windsurf-board from Fanatic - really nice! Some good winds are coming here too – so off I go asap…
Surfs up dudes!

Amsterdam in the Netherlands

Randolph Guy — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:03:44 +0000

Wonderful architecture and very nice rivers and bridges all over Amsterdam - that was the impression of this city. A very nice city with a high pulse and feeling too - lots of bicycles and people riding them too by the way. So this felt very energetic and still people were sitting all over the place taking it easy too.

Super little canals and lots of activity on them. Boats going up and down – almost as much traffic as on the roads with cars!

Free web-based chat tool

Niklas Waller — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:14 +0000

I found this great chat tool the other day - Tinychat. I have been searching for one for a while now and even started developing one myself. However this seems to meet all my expectations and more since it's very functional and free.

You start by creating an account. In the settings you specify things like the name of the chat room, description, allowed users (guest, Facebook, Twitter). Further on you can design it with some colors and background image and have 1-5 moderators connected to the chat room. The chat room can also be linked to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. A chatroom can be open or locked with a password and the same goes for the right to broadcast.

Users can also broadcast using camera and microphone. This can be controlled by the moderator. There is also functionality for showing the desktop, sharing a whiteboard, play a YouTube video and edit a group document.

You can at any time click a user of the chatroom to see more info. If a user is logged in with Facebook or Twitter there is actually something to see here. Otherwise you are able to send private messages or ignore a user. As an administrator you can also ban the user or close the camera.

In a former post I mentioned the Wibiya web toolbar. It uses TinyChat as the chat tool and as default with temporary chat rooms. If you go through the process of registering and setting up the chatroom you can use this in the Wibiya toolbar as well. This allows you to moderate the chat room which is otherwise not currently possible.

I have been to Amsterdam for a couple of days

Randolph Guy — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:18:49 +0000

We lived part of the time at “Citizen M” - a very nice design hotel. You should visit some time if you get the possibility. A nice hotel with a lot of small details that gave it just that little extra you could want.

I met Iris and Timo from Hamburg briefly and had a little chat. It turned out that Timo had taken a lot of pictures while visiting Amsterdam… We got talking and he works with “Post” – designing and fixing pictures and making the best out of them. He had on a cool “monkey” t-shirt – so I posted this monkey cartoon above.

The monkey is holding a palm-tree or leaf if you please – standing on the letter “g”.

It was pleasure meeting Irene and Timo – might meet again somewhere!

A mallard duck with her children

Niklas Waller — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:02 +0000

Me and part of my family went to Sigtuna in Sweden. It is a very old city in Sweden where Vikings lived. I could talk a lot about this city but read more on the linked site instead.

While walking near the water I spotted a mallard duck family, missing the father though. They are trying to swim through the water lillies. To be able to do so they have to climb over some of the bigger ones.

Cute ones!

A nice and usable web toolbar for your website or blog

Niklas Waller — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:03 +0000

I am in the process of looking at moving our blog to Wordpress (more about this later). While doing this I discovered a web toolbar on another blog. Normally I am not a fan of these things but this one is not installed in the web browser but instead in the actual framework which means that it pops up at the bottom of the page with several useful functions both for me as the owner and admin but also for the visitors.

I decided to give it a try when we introduce the next version of Wohill - since it's both very easy to install and to inactivate.

The web toolbar comes from Wibiya.

If you are going to install it to Wordpress you simply download a php file, upload it to the plugins directory of your wordpress installation (wp-content/plugins/). Then activate it via the wordpress admin as descrived in the installation instructions.

Some of the things that you get from this toolbar is:
- Site search
- Translation functionality
- Integration with Flickr
- Integration with your Facebook fan page
- Integration with Twitter
- Sharing functionality for different social sites
- Online count
- Chat room

A cool devil pictogram

Randolph Guy — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:01:59 +0000

Today has been a fantastic day. We have been to a great lunch with sm�g�st�rta and coffee. Really nice I must say. Great boat-ride too by the way. So I’m sitting waiting for the final in the World Cup and thought I would sketch a little pictogram.

This is what I made. A little devil dude – a cartoon feel to it and not to devilish in any way. Just some cool horns and big eyes.

Hot summer in Sweden I can say. Super nice.

A super trip from Finland to Sweden

Randolph Guy — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:03:06 +0000

A good friend of mine has a taxi-boat company. He has just expanded a lot after succesful hard work. This means that he is able to order a new boat. This is the sixth boat in the armada. A few friends have all traveled to Finland with him, including myself, to drive the boat home to the Swedish archipelago – a great adventure and a trip over the Baltic sea.

We passed a few light-houses, seagulls, seals and islands. Here is a light-house that we passed at the beginning of our return-trip.

Manage your bookmarks with Zootool

Niklas Waller — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:01:20 +0000

This is not very new information but I found it recently and tried it and liked it.

Zootool is a bookmark web application that is more visual than for example delicious, but also more elegant in my opinion.Visual because each bookmark is represented by an image or a picture. More elegant because of its design and usability.

You can integrate with many other social services and sites like delicious, twitter, facebook, tumblr, flickr etc. You can follow other people and see what they bookmark.

This means that you can browse all user's, the ones you follow or your own.

For some reason they have disabled the possibility to import bookmarks from other bookmarking sites which makes it a bit more hard to start using this since you probably already gathered thousands of other bookmarks. If they fix this I might start using it but until then probably not...

If you are using it, my account is http://zootool.com/user/nickwick76 if you would like to folllow.

And for the curious ones, it is built using Mootools.