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joseftu

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  1. The Webby Awards were announced today, and in the education category, our website (really my wife's), smarthistory.org, was the winner! Pretty cool for a small-scale free and open educational resource, made by educators, to beat out the "big boys" like the George Lucas Foundation. The reason I post this here is that the site, even from its earliest days as a WordPress install, has always been hosted here at TCH, and the support and service, through the move to a dedicated server, to the hugely increased traffic we're getting now, has been consistently excellent. Thanks, TCH!
  2. On my current server at TCH (amidala), the MySQL version is 5.0.51a. Unfortunately, there's a bug in that version of MySQL (detailed here: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=32202 ) which is going to cause problems for the navigation menus we want to use for a web-based textbook. It's fixed in 5.0.52, or there's a patch referenced in that bug page. Any chance we can get that patch applied or the version of MySQL upgraded? Or should we just try to work with the workarounds?
  3. Thanks, Bruce. I opened a ticket. Hope they can fix it!
  4. Mine is the same as what's on the cpanel instructions...i double-checked! But still not working.
  5. I installed entropychat link on a page for a colleague to use in her class some time ago--it was working fine then, but now doesn't seem to work at all--the link just times out. Any advice or ideas? Here's the page http://www.mountebank.org/isserles
  6. Well, just to update, something I don't understand. My whole workaround looks to have been unnecessary, because the import function built in to Wordpress actually does work, just fine, on TCH. Not sure why I was getting the "curl is not enabled" error message to begin with, but I'm definitely not getting it now. Let the workaround stay, in case it helps someone in some situation, but if you want to move from Blogger to Wordpress at TCH...it's even easier than that workaround! Wordpress should do it all for you. [Emily Litella Voice]Never Mind![/Voice]
  7. Thanks for those explanations, David and Jim. That really helps me to understand. As Bruce says (tactfully! ), whatever the problem was with that import script, it's gone now. Seems like it must have been (somehow) on my end. Anyway, as they say, TCH rocks!
  8. Well, that tip page relies on the same Wordpress method that requires CURL. So that's no good. Here's the thing...Wordpress 2.0 has a built-in import tab, that allows you to bring all the posts and comments from many other blogging tools directly into wordpress, with just about three clicks. No fuss, no bother. It's a neat feature, but it won't work without curl. Now, the good news is that I did figure a not-too-hard way to make it work, and I'll post that in a separate thread in the Blogging forum, in case anyone else faces the same problem. It's interesting that curl will not be enabled here at TCH--I don't know enough to understand or evaluate the security risks, and I trust that the TCH gurus do. So I'm glad not to have that risk to worry about. But I do find it interesting, because wordpress is very widely used, and very security conscious, and they included this tool in their release, and they do have curl enabled on their free host for blogs (wordpress.com). So what are they missing? I mean, I'm getting, in my searching around, some very conflicting reports--on the one side we have TCH (and it looks like several other hosts, too) with the absolutely firm position that curl is dangerous to enable. On the other side we have plenty of hosts where it is enabled, and I even read a few recommendations from people who said "if your webhost won't enable curl, they're not a webhost worth having." I'm not questioning TCH's decision (I've been happy with TCH for a long time now), and as I said I did find a way to make this work. But just out of my own curiosity, what is the danger? And why are others not aware of it? Anyway, thanks for the help, Bruce. I often (as this time) try to do things that I really don't quite understand. It gets me in trouble, but it also helps me to learn!
  9. My wife has had a blogger blog for a long time, and it was OK for her basic uses. But recently she's started doing some podcasting and vodcasting (she teaches art history--so she makes museum tours and conversations about paintings for her students), so blogger just really wasn't robust enough. I sold her on getting her own domain, and a wordpress blog, because the podpress plugin is so easy and full-featured. So I registered the domain, and set up the hosting here at TCH, and then installed Wordpress for her (that fantastico installation is, well, FANTASTIC!). Wordpress then has an admin tool to automatically import a blogger blog with all posts and everything, directly into wordpress. But that tool can not be used at TCH, because it requires that CURL be enabled, and that's not going to happen (for security reasons) at TCH. So I found this workaround, and I thought I'd post it in case anyone wants to make the same kind of move. It's not too difficult. After you've installed wordpress on your site (use that fantastico!), the first thing to do is to create for yourself a new blog at wordpress.com. This is free, and very quick (just fill out the quick form and wait for the activation email). You're not really going to use this blog, it's just a temporary step. Then you go to that new blog at wordpress.com, and in the administration interface, you'll see the "import" section. Wordpress.com does have curl enabled, so you can do the import just by following the steps (you need to enter your blogger username and password). It's about three clicks and some waiting while blogger "publishes," and now your wordpress blog will have all the content from your blogger blog. There may be some small problems to clean up. For example, for some reason, wordpress imported every single post twice from blogger--so there were doubles of all of them. Also, blogger uses curly quotes and apostrophes, and wordpress does not, so those will not come through correctly. Don't worry about any of these problems. You'll fix them later (and some will go away by themselves). Now you have a blog at wordpress.com, which is essentially the same as your blogger blog. The next step is to get that to your new wordpress blog. To do this, you're going to use the wordpress rss feed from the wordpress.com blog. But! the default theme on wordpress.com does *not* publish a feed. So that won't work. You need to go to the "presentation" section of that wordpress.com blog, and choose a different theme (Regulus 2 is a good one). Then in the "options" -> "reading" section of the wordpress admin interface, you need to tell the blog to publish the feed with full text, and to include all the posts you have (the "most recent" however many there are in total. This may be a very big number if you've had the blog for a long time. The Blog Stats on the Dashboard will tell you how many there are. Now you can view the blog (the wordpress.com blog), and you'll see the link for full feeds. You can click on that, and you'll get a browser window full of weird text. This is the xml document, and what you need to do is copy all (*ALL*) of that text, paste it into a text editor, and save it with an .xml extension on your desktop (or wherever you like). You're almost done, now. Just go now to the admin interface of you "real" blog--the one that's on your own TCH-hosted site. Get to the "import" section there...but now, instead of importing a blogger blog, you're going to choose to import from an rss feed. You just browse to the .xml file you saved before, click "import" and wait. You'll get your full blog, the archives, all the categories, everything (except the comments! ). That's it! Hope it helps someone. It took me a while to figure it out!
  10. Thanks, Bruce, but I'm afraid that's more than a bit over my head! I'm reading and re-reading, but it doesn't seem to answer my question.
  11. The newest version of wordpress has a neat feature to automagically import a blogger blog into a new wordpress installation. I'm shifting my wife away from blogger, and into a wordpress blog on her own (brand new) domain at TCH. But when I try to use the neat feature in wordpress, I get this message. How do I enable the CURL extension for PHP?
  12. Another vote for Spam Karma. After seeing the recommendations from the good folks right here at TCH, I installed it, and it works perfectly. It sends that spam right to hell before it has a chance to mess up your blog. If you use WordPress, Spam Karma is the way to go.
  13. I came across and successfully installed a very nice plugin on my Wordpress-powered blog. If you use flickr for photos already, this plugin gives you a neat, customizable, integration to put your flickr photosets into an album of galleries on your blog. The gallery retains all the flickr functionality (including the slideshows, and the exif information), and it's not all that hard to get working--just a little fiddling. You can get the plugin here http://www.worrad.com/archives/2005/01/08/flickr-gallery-07/ and some good instructions for installing on wordpress 1.5 here http://www.nicemess.com/?p=4 If you want an example of one way it can look when it's done, my blog is here http://www.mountebank.org/blog (and you can click on the photo gallery in the right sidebar). I've used Gallery, too--and that's much more sophisticated, and robust, but if you just want to have a few albums, and you already use flickr and wordpress, this is pretty good.
  14. Ah, see, this is what I was wondering about. When I get the emails SK generates, they say "comment deleted." So I thought that they really did appear (at least briefly) on the weblog, rather than never being created at all. That's much better.
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