Yep, it’s a I-haven’t-posted-anything-new-cause-I’m-busy post. Work has been busier than usual and my Cicso class has required quite a bit of my attention. Hence my time for writing witty nonsense has been more limited than usual.

I’ll try to get something more interesting to read up shortly, but for now just know that I am still alive and working my ass off.

Here’s a graph showing all the spam SEB has received since the start of September of 2009:

It's like a SPAMQUAKE!

We jumped from a low of 23 last October to a record high this month of 2,056. I just cleaned out another 154 from the spam queue and there’s already 3 new ones back in there.

On the plus side, the WordPress implementation of Akismet is damned impressive. Almost all comment spam is caught by the filter with only a couple ever making it through and with only a handful of false positives. Even then the ones that make it past Akismet never see a live page as they get stuck in the moderation queue due to having an unknown email address. It works out to a 99.377% accuracy rate which is nothing to sneeze at.

On the negative side, it doesn’t look like the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin does jack shit in terms of stopping spam bots as most of it is clearly not being typed in by hand. Having said that I must admit that I’ve not turned it off yet to see if things get worse or not, but I’m tempted to try it and see. If things are about the same then there’s little point in using it as it just annoys non-registered commenters.

So while there are aspects of WordPress that annoy me – large number of plugins to recreate functionality found in other systems, annoyingly complicated template system – I have to give them big props for an excellent comment spam solution.

So here it is: The inaugural episode of The SEB Podcast.

We cover a number of topics starting with Podcasts and moving on to a question from Decrepit Old Fool that we talk about a lot, but never actually answer. That’s followed by tangents galore that are related to DOF’s question by only the thinest of hairs and then a little gushing over the fact that George reads our blogs and some discussion of our religions backgrounds, faith healing, and politics and how we should be the leaders of the world except that we’re too lazy. We close it out with a discussion of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar which may contain a couple of spoilers so you may want to stop listening at that point if you haven’t seen the movie.

The program I used to record this podcast stuck us in separate stereo channels so I’ll be in your left ear and Dave will be in your right if you wear headphones. This turned out to be a good thing in part because Dave’s audio was much quieter than mine and I spent a good part of the last couple of days learning how to use Audacity to try and bring his levels up without distorting the hell out of it. In the end I dropped my levels down to more closely match his so you can turn up the volume and hear us both a little better. It also took a little time to figure out what data rate to save it as to keep the quality up and the file size down. The final file is 56.7 MB in size and will occupy 1 hour and 22 minutes of your time.You can download it directly by clicking here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed here or you can listen to it at the bottom of this post with the built-in handy flash player. Right now it’s being hosted on SEB’s server so I’m hoping that we don’t suddenly kill our bandwidth allowance with it, but we’ll find out soon.

We had a lot of fun doing it and we hope you’ll be at least mildly amused by the results. If you like it then we’ll do more and try to get better at it both in terms of the quality of the recording and in the quality of our discussions. Let us know what you think in the comments.

There’s still some work in massaging the file for audio levels and size, but it’s actually done. We were shooting for an hour and ended up overshooting by about 22 minutes and 36 seconds. The final file size ended up being 37.8 MBs of random babble. I have no idea if any of you will enjoy it, but ***Dave and I had a lot of fun doing it. Now I just need to figure out how to make it reasonable in size and where I’m going to post it. Should I break it up to keep the quality higher or reduce the quality to keep it a single file. I also need to try and raise the volume level of ***Dave’s track as it’s a little low compared to mine.

But it’s done and that’s the important bit and, after a bit of research on the best way to do this, I’ll post it to the site. We didn’t even get through half the questions so we’ve got material for the next one if folks find this one amusing enough that you want more.

So the long-planned and consistently procrastinated SEB Podcast is going to happen this Saturday thanks to the very responsible ***Dave who’s been pestering me that we should actually do what we said we would do. This will be our first attempt and I fully expect it to be… interesting. Yeah, interesting is a good, positive sounding word. I just hope it’s interesting for the right reasons.

Here’s the thing: As most of you who follow both SEB and ***Dave Does the Blog already know, outside of him being a theist and me an atheist, we have more in common than not. My concern is that we’re going to ask each other questions about topical items and we’re going to agree with each other so much that the entire podcast will be similar to this:

Me: I think Pat Robertson is stone-cold crazy.

***Dave: I agree completely. And I think the Teabaggers are a wee bit deluded.

Me: I totally agree.

Which is going to make for a fairly boring podcast. So I’m opening this up for you guys to participate. Got a topic you’d like to hear us pontificate on? A question burning a hole in your brain? A query you’re curious if we can help you with? Leave it in the comments or alternatively drop me an email or drop ***Dave an email if you prefer. Topics can be anything you want – politics, religion, technology, pop culture – and we’ll do our damnedest to talk about them in an amusing manner.

Yes, I know I’ve made this plea previously only to have it go nowhere, but we’re really going to do it this time barring the world coming to an end. Remember, this is our first try at this and neither one of us has done it before. Which, if nothing else, should add an air of unintentional comedy to the proceedings.

SEB’s migration is done and everything should be working properly though it may take some time for the IP address change to migrate it’s way through the net. Of course if you’re reading this then it’s made its way through your DNS servers.

We’re also trying out a slightly different theme to see if it works any better. One thing I like about it is that if you move your mouse to the upper right hand corner of the screen a couple of buttons will pop up allowing you to adjust the size of the text and or width of the layout.

As always if you spot anything that doesn’t seem to be working properly then drop me an email and let me know.

There’s been a few WP modules that weren’t working quite right and the documentation said they needed PHP5 which I thought we had on this server, but apparently we don’t. When I inquired I learned that SEB is still on one of EngineHosting’s PHP4 clusters, but they’d be happy to move me to one of the PHP5 clusters they have running. So I requested that they move us.

So sometime this weekend, and I’ll post an update when it’s due to happen, they’ll be bundling us up and shunting us over to the new server. As always any comments left during that period might not make it across depending on when you leave them, but the move shouldn’t take long so that should be kept to a minimum. It does include a change in the IP address which will have to propagate through the Internet so there may be a short period where you’ll be unable to reach SEB. Beyond that it should be relatively transparent.

I’ve had a lot of requests for a post on how I moved my ExpressionEngine blogs over to WordPress so here it, finally, is. And, no, it doesn’t really take 64 steps.

The problem with moving from EE to WordPress is that while WP has an impressive selection of importing tools for various platforms built into it, ExpressionEngine isn’t one of the supported platforms. This means we have to do it ourselves and so that’s what I set out to do. You will find in the ExpressionEngine Wiki some information on how to export to the MovableType Format, but this has a couple of limitations that made it less than ideal. For example, I used the SolSpace Tags module in ExpressionEngine and wanted to move all the tags over to WordPress, but the MT format has no facility to do that. A much better  solution would be to export to WordPress’s native WXR format which does support tags, but finding info on how the WXR format is defined (it’s an extension of XML) was more difficult than I thought it would be. It doesn’t appear anyone has sat down and specifically posted what WordPress looks for and accepts in an WXR file.

Eventually I set up a test blog in WP, put in some content that hit all the features I wanted to support, and then did an WXR export to see how the file was set up. I’m far from an expert on the WXR format, but I managed to figure out enough of it to get things to work. My method is similar to the aforementioned MT export templates except that it outputs WXR formatted data instead. You can download the templates by clicking here.

To use them you’ll want to create a new template group called “export” in ExpressionEngine. Then create two RSS templates in that group to hold the templates themselves. I called the first one “export” and the second one “comments.” It doesn’t really matter what you call the first one, but the second one must be named comments so it’ll be embedded properly. If you change the name then be sure to change it in the first template file. Both templates should be set in EE as RSS pages and you should set Allow PHP to “Yes” and “On Input” on the comments template. In the first template on the very first line is the global variable {assign_variable:master_weblog_name=”yourblogshortname”} which you should change to the short name for your blog in EE.

Once you’ve done all of that you’re almost ready to start exporting data. I use the word almost because there’s one thing that I can’t account for ahead of time and that’s the amount of data you are exporting and what RAM limits your server has. There’s also the fact that these templates do not save out to a file. Instead you have to right click on the “view” link in EE’s template listing and select “open in a new tab/window” then click on that new tab and select “show page source” which will open another new window, and then save that new window’s output to an XML file.

Doesn’t matter what you call the files (I named mine SEB1.xml, SEB2.xml, etc.), but if you try to output all of your data at once and you have a crap load of it then your browser will probably crash before you can save the file. On top of all of that, WordPress has a import size limit of 10MBs per file. In the case of SEB, at the time I made the move, I transferred some 6,500+ entries and 75,000+ comments and there was no way in hell it was all going to come out as one great big file so I ended up having to do multiple exports.

Here’s how you do that: In the first template file there’s a line that reads as follows:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}" dynamic_start="on" limit="9999" offset="0" sort="asc" rdf="off"}

The two key parameters are the limit and offset. The limit sets the total number of entries that’ll be included an in export and the offset tells it at what entry to start at. If you have a very small blog (couple of hundred entries with less than a dozen comments each) then you might be able to get away with a single export using those settings, but if not then here’s where you will have to experiment to find out what you can get away with and it will depend on how many entries you have as well as how many comments on those entries. There is a similar line in the comments template which limits how many comments to include that is set to 1,000 comments. None of the entries on SEB ever hit 1,000 comments so that worked just fine for me, but if you have entries with more than 1,000 comments you may need to edit that template as well. Due to memory limitations on my server I found that I could only export between 100 and 300 entries at a time before EE would abort with an out of memory error. This meant that I ended up exporting some 32 files total to get everything moved over. If I got an out of memory error then I’d go in and change the limit to a smaller number (usually decrementing by 50 each time) until I got a successful export. Once it was successful I’d go back in and change the limit back to 300 and increase the offset by however much the last export put out. Do that as many times as you need to to export all your data.

If that sounds like a pain in the ass, well, it is, but there’s still more that can go wrong. Because you’re generating an XML file your browser can be pretty fucking picky about any weird or garbled characters that might happen to be in your code. SEB was originally on MovableType and in the move from that to ExpressionEngine there were a few entries that ended up with some non-standard characters in them. Whenever an export hit one of those garbled characters it would cause an XML error and I’d have to try and figure out which entry was causing the problem, edit it in EE to fix the garbled characters, and then retry that particular export. I’d say there was about a dozen entries or so that caused me fits, but if you’ve been running on EE all along then this probably won’t be a problem for you.

Now for some good news: WordPress is impressively good at importing those WXR files. If you screw up and forget to change the offset number and end up with a duplicate file (or just one that has a handful of duplicates) WordPress will NOT create duplicate entries in your database. It’ll report those as duplicate entries and reject them. WordPress will also ask you how to handle entries written by people other than the account you are logged in as when doing the importing. You can either reassign those entries to an existing WP user or you can have WP create accounts for those users when doing the import. WordPress is also just fine with importing one file after another to build up your database back to normal.

Some other things to keep in mind with these templates: They make the assumption you’re using the default field names of {body} and {extended} for your blog entries. I also didn’t include {summary} as I never used it myself so you’ll need to add that in if you want it. The code I used for exporting Tags is not included because not everyone uses that module, but I can supply it if you want it. One other thing I should have done and didn’t think of until after I was finished was adding in code to check if the {extended} field existed and if it did to put in the WP code for a Read More link. So for SEB, all the entries where I had a body and extended section became one big posting under WP. If you’re at all comfortable with making EE templates then you should be able to look at these, see how I did things, and tweak them according to your needs.

That’s pretty much the process in a nutshell. Hopefully this isn’t too confusing. If nothing else it should give you a starting point if you want to make the transition yourself. Perhaps someone else will come up with an even better way to do it. Feel free to ask me any questions you have in the comments.

Most of the changes are to the back end of the sight, there’s a new built-in image editor and deleted posts and comments go into a trash bin before being deleted, so if you only ever see the front end you shouldn’t notice much difference.

But, as always, there’s a chance for weirdness so let me know if you spot anything not working.

Holy crap! I’ve been so busy with life that I totally forgot that I started this little experiment in egocentric rambling back on December 2nd, 2001. Not that I did a lot with it that month, but that’s when it officially started which means Stupid Evil Bastard is now, officially, 8 years old.

Had you told me at the time that almost a decade later I’d still be finding stuff to write about I probably would’ve laughed. I’m ADD. I have a hard time finishing all the video games I own. Yet here I am still plugging away. Sure, I tend to go in phases where I’m not as active as I am at other times and what I blog about tends to also go in phases, but I’m still banging on the keyboard when something catches my attention.

What’s even more amazing to me is the fact that there are so many people that drop by daily to see what nonsense I’m carrying on about at the time. I’ve heard from a lot of people I’d never have imagined would find my rantings worth following and even been lucky enough to meet a few of you.

I did come close to giving it up a couple of times and there are periods when I haven’t been able to come up with something to write about that I revisit the possibility. Right about then I’ll read something that pisses me off and I am off and running once more. I can’t promise you that I’ll make it to the full 10 year mark, but we’re starting on our ninth year so it’s looking like a good possibility.

Thanks for checking in on me over the last eight years. It wouldn’t have been as much fun without you.