Amar Galla’s Weblog

I have finally managed to port my blog from Wordpress to Community Server 2007. It was not at all a pleasant affair, but a very rough one. However, I am quite pleased with the result. I lost quite a bit of links as it was difficult to retain old links, and hence will loose my google rating, but don’t care. It will rebuilt again in course of time as I write more content. The one thing I managed to get it right was to retain all comments. Hence, as far as I am concerned, this migration is a success. Over the coming few weeks, I will work on the design and a few tweaks here and there, but will now concentrate on writing more.

Don’t expect the Wordpress to Community Server migration to be a simple one. I have to manually edit and correct every single one of my posts. Still have to figure out a way to set redirects from my old post URL’s to this new one. I don’t want to use Community Server functionality to create redirect URL’s as I want to create a permanent redirects hence, allowing blog aggregators and search engines to update the URL’s.

Hello,

I have been thinking about shifting to Community Server for quite a while, but due to lack of migration tools decided to hold back. Finally I have taken the dip and decided to migrate to Community Server. It has been quite a painful process and am currently migrating my posts over to this system. I hope to have all the old posts migrated very soon to this new system.

Hi Everyone. I have not been posting for quite a while. I was busy trying to migrate my blog from Yahoo to my own servers. What started as a simple task, turned out to be quite a complex task and hence I had to loose all my template changes and custom plugins etc. Things seem to look bright now and it seems like the migration is finally over. All my posts and comments are finally on my own server and working. Will give it a few days to check everything is over and update nameservers of my domain to point to this new site. If you are seeing this, then it would mean that the nameservers have updated themselves. Thanks for sticking by. I promise I will start adding great content to this blog again very soon.

Spam

Akismet has protected your site from 164 spam comments.

I have been using Akismet spam protection on this new blog from day one, and man, am I impressed. Most of the comments which Akismet blocks is actually relevant spam. Just 1 or 2 spam comments get accepted which suggests a pretty good hit ratio. I have not felt the need to move any comment from the blocked spam list back into the main site. Was spending a lot of energy with my previous blog filtering out spam, but life is much easy now, thanks to Akismet.

If you are using Wordpress and are hosting your own blog, then definitely get Akismet. I am on the commercial account, but they do have a basic account which is free.

A quick post about configuring K2. I found this excellent resource by Paul Stamatiou on customizing your K2 template.

Customizing K2 : Part 1
Customizing K2 : Part 2
Customizing K2 : Part 3

Lots of good stuff here about how to customize your K2 installation. One of the things I am looking to achieve, is to add few buttons after each post for publishing the post to digg and other such services.

I have migrated most of my important posts from my DotNetJunkies blog to this one. Wanted to do something about the look and feel of this blog, and also add some good plugins. I was interested in getting a plugin to display latest posts and comments. Also something to replace Ultimate Tag Warrior as it does not seem to work here.

What I came up with was K2. This is an excellent theme for Wordpress. Not excellent looking, but technically excellent, as it adds support for a lot of plugins which I was interested in and also provides a nice extensible way of customising my blog. I liked the style concent of K2, where I can override several of the CSS styles with my custom defnitions.

On the K2 site, I found a page with all features and plugins supported by K2. Best thing was that these plugins have been already inserted in K2, and hence it will spare me the effort to work on modifying my templates. This was attractive to me, as I did not want to mess around with php ( its been quite a while ), and I am also a bit new to the Wordpress codebase.

The plugins I installed were :

• Extended Live Archives


• Related Posts


• Brian’s Latest Comments


• Bunny’s Technorati Tags

As I sit and try to configure my blog, I am getting a reintroduction to blogging. A lot has changed since I created the DotNetJunkies blog on September 13, 2004. So I am re-educating myself to blogging and finding everything very fascinating and confusing. I have decided to write about my blog configuration as I carry on experimenting, trying to get my blog exactly as I want. So here goes.

Till so far, I installed WordPress 2.0 blog on Yahoo hosting. Installation was painless and really very simple. I did not keep the blog mapped to my root site, but close a folder, amargalla.com/blog hence keeping my main site free for other development in the future.

One of the first things I did was set the blog’s name and tagline. Well, not very happy about it, but will change it soon to suit the theme of this blog. Next I tried on various templates, but did not like any of the ones which come with WordPress. A quick search on Google revealed lots of themes. ( On a site note, just realised while typing google, I need a plugin or a setting if it exists, to automatically turn some keywords to links on my posts ). Anyways, so I have kept the theme selection for later as it can be changed anytime. I did like Bloxpress a lot as it is very similar to SharePoint which is my main area of work as of now. It is in beta and still has some bugs, so I intend to hold on for a bit before trying it out.

One of the first things I needed was to get my blog indexed properly with search engines. I generally write a lot of workarounds, and tips and tricks to overcome various bugs or tough situations in software. I plan to write more helpful tutorials and articles on this blog, but still the majority of my readers from referred from google. So anything that will index my pages better is very welcome. One of the first rule is to have better urls. The current method of wordpress ?p=1 to indentify posts, will not suffice.

WordPress does support a lot of options for formatting your permalinks. None of the out of box options served my purpose. On my Yahoo account, I found a plugin called Customizable Permalinks already activated. I could access the options from Options -> Permalinks menu. The date and name based, came very close to what I wanted, but still not very user friendly as it has a lot of sub folders. Again it was Emily Robbins to my rescue with her article on configuring wordpress to create search engine friendly links. It was exactly what I wanted. The custom format of /%postname%.htm worked very well. But then it instructed that I have to edit my .htaccess file and add a bit of code to make sure everything works properly. Here I came across a snag with Yahoo. Their file manager did not show the .htaccess file, now did it let me create or upload one as the filename begain with a “.”. So I was stuck. Having paid for the yahoo account just yesterday understanding that it was the best option for advanced wordpress configurations, I was a bit taken aback with this limitations. Have mailed Yahoo support regarding it, but unfortunately as the mail id they provide is yahoo based, it is blocked from the network here. Will have to check from home to see what they say.

However I think I found a way to overcome that limitation. I cannot loging to my account using direct ftp from this place due to firewall issues, so cannot confirm if it will work or not. Yahoo online help pages say that they currently do not allow .htaccess files to be uploaded.

Will write about how I overcame this limitation a bit later. At least I think I did, but that only time will tell.

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