I'm trying to keep everything all together over on the new version of CnV, so have taken the decision to no longer publish comments submitted here. I'm only going to post the occasional summary of new posts, and will probably even give that up after a few months. If you haven't changed your RSS feed yet, please do so.

Meantime, here's where the action is:

Wisdom of crowds, part 2: Hen nights
Wisdom of crowds, part 1: Honeymoons
Catch-up
Wisdom tooth update
ORG Day!
Toothless wonder
Gym progress

I think I've pretty much imported all of the old posts, including the old Blog-City posts that until now had been stuck on my laptop. The formatting's all gone to hell in a handbasket, but when I have a quiet moment one day I might start trying to fix at least some of the more recent ones. The theme is temporary - it will do until I find one that I prefer. And there are still a few additional tweaks and changes, but overall, it's come together much faster than I had thought it would. I've even got it all set up in Ecto too.

Guess you had better update your RSS feeds now.

OK, so it's time. I have to move away from Blogware at some point, and the pain may as well start now whilst I'm already too busy to blog much. I have disabled anonymous comments on old post, turned off comments on new posts, and set all other comments to "moderate all", so that I can make sure that any comments that do get left on all posts are caputured and moved to the new blog. There will be very little activity here til I complete move over, so please accept my apologies for that. It might take a while - I'll post here just as soon as I have things sorted.

I just noticed that the emails from Blogware informing me that a comment has gone into moderation have been caught in Gmail's spam trap, and that there is no easy way for me to look at any comment beyond the 50th most recent. I fear this means that some of you may have left comments that never appeared, and which never will appear now because they are lost somewhere in the depths of Blogware's admin system.

I'm sorry about that.

I will be moving off Blogware onto an installation of Wordpress at some point, just as soon as I can get round to it.

Today is Chocolate and Vodka's 5th birthday!

My very first post, aptly named Post Number One, was posted on Sunday 16 June 2002 at 02:07 PM BST. I feel reluctant to link to it, because it took me quite a long time to get into my stride on CnV, to find my own voice and to stop trying to be David Weinberger or Kevin Marks (who still hasn't fixed his CSS), who were my bloggy idols back then. When I read the old posts, they do sort of make me cringe a bit, but it's there in the archives, if you're really that interested.

But it's hard to believe that I've been talking shit on the web for five whole years. Wow. And people still come and read it! *shakes head in surprise*

Anyway, happy birthday Chocolate and Vodka! Here's to another five years!

It's not so fresh now, for which I apologise, but there are two episodes of Fresh Lime Soda that you might not have seen if you haven't subscribed to our RSS feed over there.

The first is a podcast on dictation, multitasking and focus.

The second is this discussion about giving presentations:



No idea when we are going to have a moment to record another one, but I suspect it will be when we're both in San Francisco later this month.

I have successfully managed to blog at least once, sometimes more than once, a day for the last seven days, as per my promise to myself. In fact, this post complete the septet. It has been fun - it's reminded me of why I started this blogging lark in the first place. Indeed, I'd say that I've enjoyed it so much that I vow now to blog every day for the next month. How's that for ambition?

What I'm less chuffed about... positive dischuffed about, as it happens... is the fact that this morning's plan to go to the gym was entirely scuppered by my awakening at some point in the middle of the night with awful stomach and back pain. I have no idea what it was, but although it was gone by morning, I lost a couple of hours sleep and just couldn't haul myself out of bed in time. Kevin had a bad night too, so we decided to skip the gym.

Turned out that was a good thing, because Kev's working on a paper for Xtech at the moment, and I'd spent a couple of hours yesterday editing it for him in Google Docs. Sadly, Google Docs has a bit of a crappy UI, and when he checked my revision it only showed him the last sentence I had typed so he thought I hadn't made many changes. When he gave me a print out of his 'new' version, I found that all my edits were missing, so I had to sit with the printout and do it the old fashioned way - with a red pen - before he left for work.

That made me late for coffee with Matt Biddulph, a situation exacerbated by my mobile phone deciding to no longer sync with my Mac. Apple have, at last, enabled native support for the Nokia E61, and have thus automatically disabled the eSeries plugin that used to make iSync work. What they didn't figure in to this was how people who were using the plugin would then sync with their Mac, given that iSync now wants to duplicate my entire calendar and address book because it doesn't recognise that the calendar on my phone is still the same as the one on my Mac. Feh. Stupid developers.

Then I spilt toothpaste down my front.

And at some point during the day I spilt something brown and unidentified onto my microfleece.

But other than that, it's been a great day. I have been working on a white paper I'm writing about citizen journalism and curation which is at that final spit and polish stage. I'm hoping to have it done by Monday, which just happens to also be my deadline.

I've spent a lot of time writing this week: blog posts, this white paper, other bits and pieces that may see the light of day sometime next spring. I have even had an idea for something else that I want to write very soon, even if I don't get round to starting it tonight. All this writing has felt good. True, I've pretty much ignored email and I'm sure there are people out there who think that I'm the most difficult person to get a hold of these days, but by George (any George you like) I've enjoyed it.

I need to write more. It makes me happy.

You might have noticed that I haven't been blogging as much as I used to. The last six months or so have been really busy and time seems to have slipped away. It's not that I haven't had anything to blog about, but somehow other things always seemed to be a bit more important. Just like in the old days, I've had moments standing in the shower, or sitting on the bus, or whilst eating lunch when I've thought "Oh, I must blog that!" and have started the mental process of beginning a blog post. But for whatever reason, the thoughts never made it out through my fingertips, into the computer and thence on to my blog.

I have to admit that I'm slightly disappointed in myself about this. I have noticed other people going through the same fallow period, and I wonder whether this is a natural part of the blogging life cycle or whether we all just got really busy at the same time.

So, starting today, I've made a promise to myself to blog every day for a week. I suspect much of this may turn out to be wedding blogging, which I hope you won't mind too much. I worry slightly that I might turn into Bridezilla if I allow myself to rant too much about the process of organising my wedding, but on the other hand you guys seem to like it. I mean, you keep commenting on my wedding posts and that just encourages me to write more about it than. So you've only got yourselves to blame.

I'm also using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, voice recognition software that allows me to write my blog posts without having to type. I'm hoping that this will speed up my writing and encourage me to write more. So far so good, although I suppose I had better make sure I don't strain my voice. A mute Suw would be a terrible thing.

I win!

You should be.

How can you resist anyone who can weave this so effortlessly into conversation:

Yes, that’s a good idea in theory, but I can’t possibly do it because of these monkeys that have just flown up my ass. Seriously, look, my last poop was 90% capuchin.

Last month I was struggling with trying to import all my old posts from Blogware into a local Wordpress install. Well, I finally managed to get it sorted, sort of.

The Blogware import script, written by Shayne Sweeney, that I had found via Chris Pirillo didn't seem to work. Every time I tried to use it, it just... did nothing. Kevin Marks had a look at it and my Blogware XML file, and suggested that I try importing it in smaller chunks. The Blogware XML indicates individual blog posts with <item></item> tags, so as long as you don't split the file inside an <item> tag you're ok. I ended up splitting my archive into nine smaller files and the importer worked fine.

Unfortunately, Blogware's export script makes no differentiation between a line break and a paragraph break, so posts are run together without paragraph breaks. Every one will have to be edited by hand to add the paragraph breaks in.

I have no idea why Blogware have done this. In fact, it's an ongoing bugbear of mine that developers the world over seem to have some weird bias against the paragraph break, even though it's important. And no, a paragraph break is not simply two line breaks one after the other - it is a different beast and it should be respected. It's in situations like this where you see why - by not respecting my paragraph breaks you turn my blog posts into one great big ugly blob of text. Cheers.

The next challenge was importing stuff from Blog-City. Kevin Marks took Shayne's original Blogware import script and tweaked it a bit, giving us this Blog-City import script. There are no categories in Blog-City posts, so they all get dumped in a 'Blogcity' category, which is fine for my purposes.

The first problem was that Blog-City had created two archives of photograph upload data, so I had to delete 150 pointless 'posts'. We then discovered that Blog-City had two dates in its XML archive:

<dateopened>2004-04-04T00:00+00:00</dateopened>
<dateupdated>2004-04-04T15:30+00:00</dateupdated>
Kevin assumed that the 'date updated' date was the date to take for determining when a post was posted, as it has a time stamp, but unfortunately it has absolutely no relevance to anything. I suspect it may have been the date stamp for when the post was exported. The date opened date, however, is the one you want. But it has no time stamp. It seems that I pubished all my blog posts spot on midnight. Wow. How OC is that?

This means that on days when I posted more than once, I have no way of telling which post came first (and I can't go back and check because the lovely people at Blog-City deleted my blog). For my purposes, however, this is not a problem, but it is rather shoddy work if you ask me.

Initially, the import script was ignoring the differences between line breaks and paragraph breaks too, but whereas we could find no cure for this in Blogware's export, Kevin was able to cure it for Blog-City, so I have my paragraphs. However, some of the encoding's screwed, so Kevin had to make a special case for apostrophes in order to turn them from a mush into proper apostrophes. Some of the encoding remains screwed, but I'll have to fix that by hand.

So now I do have all my posts in one database. Any new comments will be missing, but in general I have everything up to 6 December 2006. That's enough for me for now.

My next decision is, do I stay with Blogware or leave? But that's a topic for a different post.

I'm happy to say that my T'Other has finally got himself his own blog. It's fantastic having him on Strange Attractor, of course, but that's our work blog and frankly we talk about work far too much already. So Kev's started himself a Wordpress blog: A little Jack with that? There, he says he's going to talk about 'wine, wilderness backpacking, food, writing, books, travel, music', but whatever he writes, I know it's going to be interesting.

So head on over, and read his first post on the bottle of Taylor’s Quinta de Terra Feita Port 1996 that we drank on New Year's Day with friends. It was, I can confirm, a gorgeous port, really lovely - both the perfect aperitif for the beginning of a new year, and the perfect topic for an inaugural blog post.

Having decided that yes, I am going to look through all my old posts to see if any of them might possibly work in dead tree form, the next thing to do is figure out precisely how to do that.

My current preferred methodology is to have a local installation of Wordpress on my Macbook, import all my blog posts, and then be able to go through and categorise them as 'yes', 'no', and 'maybe'. That way I can try to filter them on the fly until I have a collection that looks like it might work.

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to get Wordpress up and running. Thanks to help from my friends on IRC, and the Maczealot tutorial, I got it halfway there. Everything worked apart from the final Wordpress installation page. Then Dan told me that the version of PHP4 that OS X ships with doesn't actually support MySQL, which is somewhat less than handy. However, he pointed me at PHP5 which, once installed, made Wordpress just work.

Nice!

Having done it once, I will now be able to have as many Wordpress blogs as I like on my Macbook, and I can set them up myself.

Now for importing all my various Chocolate and Vodka archives into Wordpress. I tried importing my Blogware and Blog-City archives as 'RSS', but WP wasn't having any of that at all. When I try to import Blog-City XML archive as RSS, it says that it has been imported, but it hasn't - there's nothing there. Well, I sort of expected that as Blog-City has never played well with others, and so I'm about as unsurprised as you can be and still have a pulse.

Blogware, though, that should be different. I tried the RSS import, but nothing. So I had a Google, and I came across a post by Chris Pirillo about importing Blogware archives, which includes a link to a Wordpress plug-in that goes in the 'import' folder and gives you an 'import from Blogware option'. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

I started off with the error 'The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini', so I dug out php.ini and edited the upload_max_filesize to something absurdly big. Then reset Apache by stopping and restarting Personal Web Sharing.

Then I got a new error, 'Unable to create directory /Library/WebServer/Documents/CnVthebook/wp-content/uploads/2006/12. Is its parent directory writable by the server?', so I had to go and set the wp-content and uploads directories to read-writable.

OK, great, at least it's progress.

Then came the brick wall. When I try to import from Blogware I can browse to my archive file, select it, click 'import', and then I get a screen which just says 'Import Blogware'. And nothing else. Nothing to click, nothing to indicate that anything more is happening. Nothing. Nada.

A quick Google gets you a page on the Wordpress forums that says:

In Firefox, I found that I receive "script timeout" errors that offer "Stop" and "Continue" -- if you're using this browser or MSFT's IE gives you a similar error, keep hitting continue.

But I don't get these buttons at all, not in Safari or Firefox.

So now I have a nice shiny new blog, and nothing in it.

It's ludicrous that it should be so hard to export from one blog engine and import into another. These words are my words, and if I want to move them from A to B, then I should be able to do so. It annoys me no end that my words get stuck in XML files that I can't then import into the blogging platform of my choice.

I'm sure that I'll somehow manage to do this in the end. I'm sure that someone kind will write me some script that will tidy the XML I have into a format that can be imported by Wordpress. But it shouldn't be this hard.

I've just got back from a small breakfast put on by Edelman to talk about blogs. Kevin was speaking and I was chipping in from the audience, and I have to say that it was a good mix of people and some interesting stuff was said.

If you've landed here from the link given in the handout, then welcome! This is my personal blog, so I tend to talk about anything that's on my mind, from films to books to toothache to rants about dishwashers. Oh yes, all life is here. (That's why it's my most used category.)

If you're looking for something a bit more bloggy or social softwarey, then try Strange Attractor, my Corante blog which I share with Kevin and where we talk about the media, blogs, wikis, and all sorts of other stuff. Highlights there include my social software adoption strategy and my blogging case study. (UPDATE: It seems that the Corante archives are having a few problems today, so you may have difficulty accessing the site. Apologies for that. Hopefully Corante will fix things soon.)

If you want to know more about me, then you might try the sorry-slightly-out-of-date Blogiculum Vitae, where my professional portfolio lives.

But feel free to have a look round and if you'd like to contact me then please do.

Kev's reported problems accessing Strange Attractor recently. I haven't noticed a significant problem, but if you have can you please let me know? Have you tried to read or comment and found there to be problems?