It’s a simple, beautiful little story. But half the skill is not in telling a tale, it’s in how you do it. Look at Avatar which, I maintain, has a very weak story but is told in a rather amazing fashion. Or indeed, at the silent video I posted a few weeks ago. This is simple, but really clever.

Enjoy Parisian Love…

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Google Superbowl ad

                          

Bravery in action

There are three, that I know of, things to commemorate today – June 6th. Well, four if you include the fact that 6am on the 6th of the 6th is a good time to draw pentagrams and balance up how much you reckon your soul could be worth on the black (and I mean black) market.

First up, Tetris is 25 years old today. This scares me as I thought it was younger, partly as it means I’m even older than I thought I was. Google are in on the celebrations as they’ve given their title page a little facelift for the occasion.

Secondly, the first YMCA was opened in London this day in 1844. Not only a cheap (well, they were) place to stay and work out with oily young men, if it weren’t for these establishments then we’d be missing out on one of the greatest party dances of all time. Plus one of the funniest segments in Wayne’s World 2.

Finally, it’s the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the D-Day landings, back in 1944. Were it not for this one then you could have waved goodbye to the YMCA. Wayne’s World would never have been filmed. Forget Tetris – the Russians making computer games? As if.

There’s no doubt we could live without them. Who plays Tetris much these days? And when was the last time anyone who reads this stayed in a YMCA? But think how different the world would be had it not been for the successful campaign begun by Operation Overlord on the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago.

This is, without a doubt, one of the most important days in recent human history and it should be remembered as such. More important than Armistice Day – this is the day that most of the men fighting for your freedom and mine laid down their lives. The surrender of Germany would, quite probably, not have occured had it not been for this huge invasion.

Certainly a day to remember. Most certainly not a day to ever forget.

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• Veterans gather for D-Day event (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Happy Birthday Tetris! Love, Google. (mashable.com)
• Google’s Tetris Logo (blogoscoped.com)
• Computer game Tetris celebrates 25 years (telegraph.co.uk)
• D-day anniversary: Britain’s good war (guardian.co.uk)

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A day of anniversaries

                          

Maybe I should search for this

Just random, no reason for asking… what was the last search query you did on Google or wherever? Mine was:

ubuntu vpn server ports

Which pretty much sums me up. Good job I hadn’t just been on Google Image Search or I’d have had to confess about looking for cumshots.

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Search question

                          

Google have proved they have a sense of humour by releasing a funky add-on to the Labs in Gmail. All it does is confirm that you really, really want to send that email you just typed. Which sounds silly, but how often have you bunged off a random SMS while drunk that you kind of wish the girl in accounts hadn’t received? Or gotten horny (while drunk) and emailed an ex to suggest that perhaps one more try together might actually be a good idea?

Mail Goggles aims to stop that. Whenever you send a message (based on a schedule, defaulting to late night at weekends) it asks you to solve a couple of maths problems before it’ll actually release the mail.

Completely silly. But I like it. I really wish I’d had something like that on my mobile way back in the past.

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• Google Mail Goggles
• Mail Goggles: The cure for drunken emails
• Google Cracks Down On EWI

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Could you use this GMail add-on?

                          

As well as doing searches, Google‘s capable of some other funky things. Try entering the following if you’re in a foreign country:

16500 VND in GBP

That’ll convert Vietnamese Dong into British Pounds. Handy for any currency conversions.

define serenity

Popping that in your search box will return a definition at the top of the page, followed by the usual search.

what is the time in Beijing?

Will, surprise, give you the current time in the Chinese capital. Hell, if you’re not sure what the capital of China is:

what is the capital of China?

Maths is another useful function. Quite a few complex functions such as roots, squares and the like can be handled. Yet it falls down on subtraction. Before they fix it, try:

399999999999999-399999999999998

Copy/paste if you want to ensure you get the digits correct. I’m pretty sure you can get the correct answer. Shame Google can’t.

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Google can’t count

                          

Only today I’ve noticed that two functions I’ve had for some time have both vanished for no apparent reason. The first is something I’d waited ages for and was quite pleased when it arrived – the ability to view Powerpoint presentations online as slideshows. Handy as I can’t be bothered installing the part of OpenOffice that I’d need to open them.

The option’s gone. The bottom of my emails just doesn’t give me the facility any more. I just have “View as HTML” which gives me a message that if I want to see the images, I have to download it. And the option to download it.

Secondly, and even more bizarrely, I can now only search my contacts based on email address and name. I can’t search on Notes, addresses or phone numbers. I could do this before. I know I could. While travelling, I meet a lot of people in hostels and the like. I usually put a couple of notes for them so I know where I met them due to my poor memory.

Also, it’s useful if I know I’m travelling somewhere. I can search my contacts on their address or location and email the people I know who are there. Easy.

Only, again, this functionality has gone.

At the top of the page, next to “Help” is a link to “Older version”. I tried this. And the features have returned.

So I have to decide. Do I want coloured blobs for my labels – which is nice but hardly necessary – and a Google Talk box down the left which I never use and wish I could get rid of… or do I want to be able to search my contacts properly, and view files I’m sent?

Hardly a brain-aching decision. I’m only glad Google allow the option of skipping back to the older version. But for how long?

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GMail losing functionality?

                          

That’s what I typed into Google to find the plugins and instructions to get my old Haloscan comments over into this blog. And seeing as Babs asked, I thought I’d rattle off my version of the transfer – including the hiccups I had and how to get around them.

I started with around 900 posts on Blogger and 4500 comments on Haloscan (ah, for the old days when I was popular)! Haloscan is a free service, and works pretty well after some wobbly periods bad in the day, but I just liked the new functions I can get on WordPress with easier control over the comments and so on. As an aside, I highly recommend the Subscribe To Comments plugin. Works a treat and, despite what it says on the WordPress archive it is fine on v2.5.

OK, so we’re moving from Blogger and Haloscan to WordPress. There are things that you must have – settings, versions and so on. I’ll assume you’re moving to WordPress 2.5 as it’s the current release. Anyone using a wordpress.com blog will be using this by default as they upgraded recently. However… you won’t be able to transfer your Haloscan comments onto a wordpress.com-hosted blog as far as I know. I’ll explain why later.

Step 1 – Prepping Blogger

First of all, ensure you’re using “new” Blogger. Virtually every Blogger blog is now on this. It used to be called Blogger Beta. If for some reason (or somehow) you’re not running this version then check the Blogger online help for details of upgrading. It’s quick and easy.

I was publishing my Blogger blog to my own webspace. This is not the default setting for Blogger, which is to publish to a Blog*Spot address. This Blog*Spot setting is required for transfer due to the method WordPress uses to syphon your posts out of Blogger. Just go to Settings and Publishing on your Blogger blog and ensure you’re publishing to a Blog*Spot address. If you’re not, then change it. Any name will do for the address – it’s temporary after all. Don’t worry, this won’t affect your posts stored on your FTP space if you’re doing that – you still have all that in place as a backup.

The instructions I read also told me to change the Timestamp Format in the Formatting section to be “mm/dd/yyyy” – apparently the default. I think this is only relevant for older versions of the import as I left mine on “hh:mm” and had no problems.

Two other settings which must be configured are as follows:

• Archiving / Archive Frequency must be “Monthly”
• Archiving / Enable Post Pages? must be “Yes”

The latter one got me for ages as I tried to figure out why I was only importing one post from each month…

Step 2 – Importing Blogger

Next, you go into your brand new empty WordPress database and use the Import facility. Follow the instructions in there and it should be nice and simple. All your posts magically drag over. Do check them once they arrive, though. Some things may be broken – such as internal links. It’s highly unlikely that the links direct to pages that worked in Blogger will also work in WordPress. Also, some formatting may be off, although WP2.5 does seem to handle embedded YouTube videos (for example) where earlier versions didn’t.

Step 3 – Prepping Haloscan

First off – as mentioned above, if you’re using a wordpress.com-hosted blog, then you cannot do this. Stop now. You can continue to use Haloscan, but starting from scratch comment-wise. Your old comments will be there, but you won’t be able to access them via the blog interface. I will now explain why.

To import the comments, you need to use a plugin. You cannot install your own plugins at wordpress.com, or in most other ISP-hosted solutions which use WordPress as their blogging platform. It involved admin access to certain folders which they simply won’t give you.

To configure WordPress’s imported posts to link to the existing Haloscan comments on Haloscan, you need to run queries on the internal database structure – and also run a plugin. Again, you simply won’t be able to do this.

The only way to manage these two options (I’m covering the former) is to host WordPress in your own webspace on your own server, or at least to one where you can get administrative access in some way. Sorry, but I think this rules Babs out!

I mention this now as you have to spend real cash money to get your comments out of Haloscan. They charge $12 per year for an upgraded account, one benefit of which is being able to download your comments as XML files. I thought this was decent value. After using them for maybe 4 years or so, that’s barely $3 per year as a goodbye present. Of course, if you already use the upgraded service then this isn’t a problem and you can go ahead and download.

Each 1000 comments comes down as a single file. Download as many as you need and number them so that it’s obvious they are different files. The order doesn’t matter so long as you make sure not to overwrite any!

Step 4 – importing Haloscan to WordPress

Your next step is to visit Justinsomnia’s page and download his excellent utilities for dragging your comments over. There are two steps: getting the post IDs from Blogger and then importing the comments from the files downloaded above.

As an aside, this is the reason you can’t just plug Haloscan into WordPress and have it viewing all your old comments connected to the same posts. When you import from Blogger, the “new” WordPress posts each get a unique ID numbering from 1 upwards. Similarly, on Blogger, each new post gets an ID. The thing is, these numbers will be wildly different and based on them being unique amongst all Blogger posts. As a result, your Blogger post 1075543567465125 (for instance) could well be number 23 in WordPress.

Haloscan used the PostID to reference “conversations” of comments, so by moving that post from one site to the other, that link is broken. One way to fix it would be to drag the numbers down from Blogger and update the equivalent ones in WordPress with their “old/original” values. I don’t have a plugin for this, but it’s a moderately simple piece of SQL code once you’ve run the first part of Justinsomnia’s routine. Then continue using HaloScan as if you’d never stopped.

But this post’s about bringing everything into WordPress, so we continue.

Following the instructions on Justinsomnia’s page, first install the get-blogger-post-ids plugin and run it. This scans your Blogger blog and takes those PostIDs I mentioned, clagging them onto a table within WordPress where they’re associated to the dragged-over posts.

The last stage is to import the actual comments. The important thing to mention here that’s not included in the original instructions is this: if you have more than one XML file of comments to import, then do them one at a time or you will get errors.

import-haloscan.php is not a plugin, instead running as a standalone file. Upload it into the wp-admin folder as instructed and also upload your first XML file (not all of them!). Run the PHP script and you should find your first 1000 comments dragged in quite quickly. Delete that XML file from the server and replace it with the next. Repeat as necessary.

And that should be it. Once you’re done, you can disable and delete the get-blogger-post-ids plugin, and erase the import-haloscan one.

Job’s a good ‘un. And it works. As you can see.

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(Blogger and) Haloscan to WordPress