Category: iBlog

Exporting from iBlog 1 and 2 to WordPress

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Did you ever wish to export your entries from iBlog 2 to another platform? Absent completion of iBlog 2 and an official export tool / script from Lifli, you were pretty much on your own if you wanted to switch away from iBlog. With iBlog 1 there was a 3rd party tool, but the geeky adventure is not really for novice users or the faint of heart. If you are interested in this route, I recommend Bruce McKenzie’s  Step by step guide iBlog to WordPress. There is some change regarding versions & installing of MAMP & WordPress, but the guide outline still holds. With iBlog 2 you were looking at long nights of copy – pasting, depending on the size of your blog. That is, until now. I was contacted last week by fellow iBlog user Jerry Seeger from Muddled Ramblings and Half baked ideas. Facing the thought of manually exporting his entries, he grabbed the bull by the horns and developed an export script that allowed him to migrate his entries from iBlog 2 beta to WordPress. Story about this on his blog. He contacted me to ask if there are fellow iBloggers out there who would benefit from his script.; which I know there are some. In brief communication with him I suggested a tutorial and forum might be handy to more easily help other users and aid with communication & troubleshooting. So,  he created the iBlog Survivors forum. Regardless of whether you want to move to WordPress right now or later or wish to keep using iBlog; I think it would benefit all current users to register on the iBlog Survivors forum. With the loss of the ibloggers. net forum we lost a major line of communication and peer to peer assistance. I think that, using Jerry’s script, it should also be possible to easily migrate from iBlog 1 to WordPress. Get iBlog 2 beta. Import your v1 blog into v2. Then export using Jerry’s script.

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Restoring image links from imported iBlog entries

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I just restored the image links for the old entries that originally were posted with iBlog. After exporting the iBlog entries using Agitprop and importing them in a local WordPress install using MAMP (or WAMP) – Bruce Mc Kenzie has a very good write up on this process on his blog – the image links pointed to localhost. This meant they showed fine on the local computer. Upon importing the entries into a live WordPress blog, those links are not updated however and the images not imported. The typical result is no image is displayed and/or a blue question mark square in the entry: Two things are going on: 1) the images are not present in WordPress 2) the paths to the images inside the entries are incorrect There has to be an easier way to fix this outside of opening iBlog and a 3rd party offline WordPress client (can’t be done online, as images need to be uploaded) simultaneously; and copy/pasting entry data between the two. Each problem actually has an easy fix and can be done online or offline in your MAMP/WAMP environment. Step 1: Add iBlog images to the WordPress installation iBlog has the following folder structure. Images are buried several levels deep. Which would give you a serious workout if you were to manually retrieve those images. Using FileJuicer (MacUpdate, Homepage) you can extract all the images in one step. In the Preferences, select the images file types you wish to extract (generally GIF and JPG) and in the results designate a destination folder. Deselect thumbnails as those are not needed. Drag and drop your Sites > iBlog > Bxxxxxxxxx folder over to the FileJuicer window and it will do all the heavy lifting for you. In the result folder there will likely be some category icons and maybe some other files you know you will not need on the new blog. So delete those. Time to upload the rest of the extracted files to your WordPress blog. You may know that WordPress stores images in dated year and month folders, which would pose a problem. But, the old iBlog entries we imported have an image path without dates; so we can just simply upload all iBlog extracted images to one folder. To keep things neat and tidy I decided on a subfolder /iblog under uploads. Using FTP I created iblog under uploads. And copied all extracted images over. That concludes step 1. Step 2: Correct the image paths of imported iBlog entry images Manually this would be another one of those repetitive nightmare things. Fortunately we can use a super handy Search and Replace plugin. (WordPress extend directory, Plugin Developer Homepage) Download the plugin, copy it to the WordPress plugin directory on your server and activate it in your WordPress environment. Safety note: There is no undo with this plugin. So, make sure you have a backup of your WordPress installation and database and familiarize yourself with how you may have to restore it in…

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iBlog 2 preview released

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As of today Mac users can finally get a glimpse of the upcoming iBlog 2. After a few delays in the past months, it missed the official alpha / beta transition point by a week. It honestly was a close call. A pair of recently discovered necessities, together with the strong pursuit of maximum flexibility, slowed things down. The good news is that the road ahead is brighter & shorter. I know all too well it has been a long wait. But, iBlog 2 has come a long way. Rebuilding from the ground up with absolute emphasis on flexibility, customizability & user friendliness – based on v1 user feedback and new trends – takes a lot of thought and effort. So, yes, it’s not complete just yet, but it’s close. There are a few more exciting features on the drawing board, which I’m sure will be well received. So, if you have a spare moment, download it, have look, share some thoughts in the forum and give Sarat a thumbs up :) iBlog v2 preview – also known as beta 1 – is available from Lifli at ibloggers.net :)

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Now Playing iPod Color themes

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Here are two iPod Color images to use with Now Playing, discussed earlier this week. Just save the image to your hard drive in the Theme subfolder of Now Playing and rename to theme.png. The first is a 150px wide blank iPod Color screen: The second is a 150px wide blank iPod Color with a slightly enlarged screen area. A regular scaled down iPod’s screen is too small to contain text at a decent size (plus small fonts often render bad), so I bumped the screen up by a few % :) Enjoy!

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Display iTunes music info on your blog

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MacDude pointed out that you can use Now Playing to display iTunes track info on your blog. Now Playing is a little widget that checks iTunes every 15 seconds and then can upload the track data to any FTP, .mac or WebDav location. You can either use one of the default themes or build a custom one, which is music to my ears. Unfortunately the documentation is in Japanese only and to make matters worse their example XML file does not contain all the needed code to make it work. Existing themes only address font styling. So, it took me a while to find trick to get positioning sorted out, by adding an extra variable. I don’t know all the ins & outs of how to customize this particular Now Playing xml file; but this is what you need: Create a subfolder under Theme. In that folder you need a theme.plist file with xml info and a theme.png image as background. The first two # for PosAlbum PosArtist & PosSong indicate the left & right margin. The third # is the vertical spacing from the bottom. Add any custom PNG image you wish to use for background, (set spaces & align accordingly) and you get: I wrote the author asking about some English documentation. Babelfish didn’t want to help translate.

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iBlog 1.4.2

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Lifli made iBlog 1.4.2 available with the following updates (it’s not announced yet): 1. Uses the latest .Mac SDK from Apple for iDisk publishing.2. Added support for printing entries from the Add/Edit entry window.3. The next and previous buttons in the photo entry window circle through the photo collection.4. Fixed some issues in the RSS 2.0 feed file. This update should help with podcasting & photo publishing.

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Max – a 7 style iBlog template set goes live

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Still using the standard iBlog template because you don’t really have a “green thumb”? Suffer no more. Thanks to our fellow iBlogger, Robt from naafront.com; you can now put the standard iBlog template set aside and use “Max“. Max is Robt’s latest masterpiece; which features full screen width with fluid blog body and fixed side column; 7 color schemes and lots of CSS goodies to spice up paragraphs & images. To make sure anybody can use his design, he created a tutorial site: Blog By Numbers, which covers the design’s background, all the features and a quick start guide. Check it out! I hope a few people think it’s worth promoting Robt’s work by “word of blog”, ( I certainly do,) as he put a lot of effort into it to benefit all iBlog users & iBlog. Do you know anybody that still uses the default template set? Give ‘m a nudge in the right direction ;)

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iBlog 1.4.2 b2

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Lifli announced an interim build towards iBlog 1.4.2 at iBloggers.net. You can now print entries, next & previous buttons have been updated and publishing to .mac now uses the latest.Mac SDK (version 1.1) – which may be of interest to those with certain publication issues.

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RSS headlines in your blog with RSS Digest

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During a quick “google” to answer a question at the ibloggers forum; I came across RSS Digest this afternoon. It’s a donation supported website where you can create a customized headline version of any valid RSS feed. You copy/paste the RSS (of the site which’ headlines you would like on your blogpage), click create the code, choose a few options, copy/paste the resulting javascript link in your template and voila. Example:———–MacCentral Headlines Certainly a nice extra tool for our toolbox.

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