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.
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 case things don’t go as planned. The fact that this Search and Replace function worked fine for me doesn’t guarantee it does for everybody or that one can’t make a mistake in using it.
With that out of the way, let’s have a look at the path of working image link, which we can do via view source on the site itself and in HTML view inside the Wordpress:
And the path of a broken iBlog image link:
We know we uploaded the images to uploads > iblog in my case and so we can do the following replacement using the Search and Replace plugin.
Select the top option to search and replace inside Content.
And set the path to reflect that of your iblog images on your server installation.
Seconds later it will say it performed the action successfully. And, voila, the images are present in the old iBlog entries :)
cast a vote in the iBloggers.net forum about how fast iBlog loads on your
machine. Link: http://www.ibloggers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1504
[Edit: corrected the URL. Thanks,
Rich!]
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 :)
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!
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.
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.
“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 ;)
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.
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.