Just installed 3.0, and we shall see what it does for me.

Interesting video.

Even more interesting

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So I stumbled across a new plug in for WordPress which creates a Theme for iPhone, iPod and other handheld devices, and it seems pretty cute.

WPTouch  by Brave New Code is quite the plug in and I am testing it out on this site, with an eye towards putting it on Canadian Personal Finance in the future (after all one of the functions of this site is as a test site for new ideas and concepts). The theme is Adsense ready so that is mighty cool as well, but right now I haven’t tried to customize it very much either, so I have much to read and learn about using this cool new plug in.

So far, I rate it as a Must Get if you are using WordPress and you want more iPod and iPhone readers. Not sure how I advertise this capability yet, but we shall see, stay tuned.

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WordPress 2.7.1 is installed on both sites now although the automatic upgrade in WordPress seems to have failed. I used Dreamhost’s 1 click upgrade instead, which seems to have worked no problem (which is a nice change too). The 1 click upgrade may be the way to go in the future, we shall see.

Advertising seems to be hunting me down these days given the site seems to have a higher readership these days, and I am attempting to monetize my RSS feed a bit more. The RSS feed seems to be a bit of a dead leader when it comes to making money, so I am now inserting ads by hand into the feed just to see if that might help out. Have added Chapters Indigo, Quicktax, and BBC Canada to the list of advertisers.

I actually had a commenter mention how odd it was that I had Playboy on my list of ads, I thought it was interesting that someone actually even noticed, since I didn’t think anyone actually looked there. Good feedback to know.

The content continues to grow, with Video content on the weekend, and the occasional link by larger sites helping to keep the readership up.

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Canadian Personal Financehas been up and down a lot in the past week or so, which is annoying and not very good for business either. The servers were visible but WordPress was misbehaving (mostly a couple of SQL issues too).

The Dreamhost folks suggested trimming down the number of plug ins I run in WordPress, since there seemed to be a runaway process on my server that I owned, and they also pointed out that simply deactivating the plug in was not enough, it needed to be physically removed from the disk. I was skeptical but after the 3rd off line event, I decided to comply with their suggestion.

I think the main culprit may have been the broken links plug in, because it traverses the entire SQL database interrogating every single link to see which ones are still active, and so far that seems to have remedied the situation (we shall see if this is really the case).

I continue to watch and make sure my servers are up.

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Hope all my readers have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. 

I promise to post more in the new year and have some plans for the Financial Blog including:

• Revamp the theme, it really does suck and is quite cluttered, but not sure which way I want to go with it right now. 
• Do some more investigations of blogging and SEO ideas to see if I can cross the threshold and start making some good money blogging. 
• Actually make some money on something other than Adsense!

Happy New Year!

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More strangeness with the Financial Site with my RSS feed from feedburner dieing off.  It is not just feedburner but the feed check utility also times out on my server, so I have sent yet another support request to my friends at Dreamhost. Meanwhile my Feedburner subscriber count drops like a stone thanks to my feed looking dead. This site’s RSS seems to be fine, so I am starting to wonder if maybe my WordPress has been hacked or the like, so there may be a new Theme on the Financial Site as well.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American Brother(s) (I actually have a brother who got his green card, and is now as American as it gets). Enjoy your Tur-Duck-En and your football (I will be).

WordPress 2.6.5 has been upgraded on both sites as well.

Epilogue

I must now apologize to Dreamhost since the problem seems to have been I had too many articles in my feed (20) and too much content and Feedburner says specifically that too big a feed is a problem too. I seem to have remedied this with the Most Humblest of Apologies to my friends at Dreamhost.

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Interesting problem has arisen with two of the plug ins I run on my Canadian Personal Finance site.

I added the commentluvplug in a while ago, where commenters are invited to include a link to one of their posts on their site. I like this plug in as it is kind of cute, and the links put into the comments are actually “no follow” so it doesn’t hurt me much either.

I also run Akismet comment spam checker and it does not seem to like commentluv at all. Luckily I check the spam queue before I flush it each time (this plug in has caught over 11,000 spam comments for me, so I do highly recommend it), and I find a bunch of comments from regular commenters in the SPAM queue, because they had used the commentluv post capability as well.

My guess is Akismet sees the link in the comment assumes it is SPAM and throws the comment out. Hopefully it will learn not to do this, but I will need to watch my SPAM queue a little closer for a while is my guess.

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I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog in February while I was attempting to transition from my old site on Blogspot to my new site at Dreamhost. At the end of it, I over thought it, and should have simply shut down the Blogspot site after a month and not worried about redirection, but for those who wish to bash their heads against a wall, feel free to learn from this mistake. 

301 Redirect from Blogspot Blog

So while attempting to follow all the in’s and outs for the 301 redirect set up I made many blunders but I think I now have an 85% solution.

Using the WordPress sitemap, I was able to get a list of most of the articles and the archives on the WordPress side of things. I mistakenly thought that the article naming would be the same from WordPress to Blogspot, however that was a huge error, but that is putting ahead of myself. Let’s see if I can remember each blunder as I made it.

• I had a list of links that all were of the form http://canajunfinances.com/????/??/??/<article title> which needed to have the site stripped off them and then the date stripped off before the title name so that it became /YEAR/MN/<article title> .
• I installed VIM (vi for windows) to do a lot of this.
• First I imported .xml sitemap file into Excel and then stripped out the unusable columns, leaving a single column of the format in the first bullet. I then duplicated that column so I had two columns and then saved the file in tab separated format.
• The error with using excel which then saved it, is that it broke a bunch of the longer lines into TWO lines, but I only figured that one out later.
• I opened the text file in VIM, and replaced the http://canajunfinances.com with what was needed to make Redirect 301 old-page-trail new-page-full-URL.
• So now I had a file with two columns with all of these 301 redirects which I then saved as .htaccess.
• On my web site I saved the existing .htaccess file in a BACKUP directory and then noted it had stuff in it already, so I appended all my redirects onto the end and tried it on my site. SERVER FAILURE messages came up. I put back the old .htaccess and the site came back.
• I then shot myself in the foot by accidently deleting a bunch of the files in my blog’s directory, spent 1/2 an hour piecing it back together. Don’t do that!
• Tried a few iterations of the .htaccess file, the first one with just the Month archives, which worked fine.
  • To test it you have to go to the BLOGSPOT publish section and point the BLOGSPOT blog to the new site. It is also easy to undo.

  I got bold and tried a bigger file and it failed.

• After trying that a few times, I then decided to test my .htaccess file on my home wordpress config on my local pc (no ftp involved and no danger of screwing up my real site).
• Tried full .htaccess file again, Server failure.
  • Removed most of the list, and the server was fine.
  • Added month at a time, and waited to get a failure, which I then found, after a few additions.
  • This is where I figured out that the command lines were getting broken into two lines with a ^M in them. Had to fix all of those (about 100 of them) by hand.
  • Once they were all fixed I had a complete file that did not cause my server to crash. Notice I didn’t say that worked right.

  Now that I had a .htaccess file that didn’t cause my server to crash I uploaded it to my WordPress site via FTP.

• Moved blogspot to point at my new site, month archives worked fine, so then I tried out some of my individual postings, and started getting Error 404 (article not found).
• Learned that Blogspot removes many common words from their posting addresses on line, such as “A”, “THE” and a few other, so by hand I removed those from a plethora (over 300) postings.
• Oh I also had to remove the DAY date from the postings earlier on as well (on EVERY posting, over 750).

I now have a working .htaccess that I sure does not work for every single posting, but should point most of the posts over from my old site. I need to create entries for categories, and other things as well.

Epilogue

It all worked eventually but I must have spent over 30 hours elapsed time on this, and at the end of it, I still ended up with a ZERO Page Rank for a while because Google thought I was attempting to double post the same content. 

I would suggest doing what I have done now, which is blow away the old blogspot site after a grace period, recreate it and have it have 1 post which points to your new site, and then use various tools to find all the links to your OLD site and ask the owners of the linking site to update their links to your new site. Might take a little less time, too!

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Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code from TechCounter:

301 Permanent Redirect from Blogger Beta to WordPress

11. May 2007, 10:51 By Ryan Ferone

Most Bloggers start out with free blog hosting with the most popular of the free services being Google’s blogger where you get a yoursite.blogspot.com address. Now you want to move from Blogger to your own domain. One of the best publishing software is provided by WordPress and the best part is it is free. Importing to WordPress from Blogger used to be a breeze using WordPress’s import posts feature. However when Google moved from Blogger to the new Blogger or Blogger Beta, it became impossible to use WordPress’s import utility.

However, you can now do so with the steps outlined here about Importing Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

Many users were able to implement this method successfully. Now, we move to the next step. Lets deal with some questions I had so far …

1. What happens to my old blogger blog? Should I just delete it after importing to WordPress?

2. I heard Google penalizes duplicate content. I now have my posts at both my old blogger blog and my new WordPress blog hosted on my domain. What should I do?

3. You mentioned using the 301 permanent redirect from blogger to wordpress. Can i do it?

Okay … lets deal with these questions first.

1. No, you should not delete your Blogger blog. I am sure you worked hard at it. You might have many subscribers to that blog. The search engines have content indexed to that blog. What happens if you delete your blogger blog is simple … you end up LOSING ALL YOUR TRAFFIC, all your loyal subscribers and visitors simply because they dont know your new address.

2. Yes, Google penalizes duplicate content. How do you deal with this.. well read on

3. When people move from their old website to a new one they use a 301 permanent redirect method without being penalized by the search engines. However, you cannot do this straight up with Blogger because you do not have access to your .htaccess file. So its not a simple plug and play unfortunately because of this.

How to redirect your old Blogger posts to your New wordpress blog posts using a permanent redirect

I wanted to thank Owen Barder for his excellent code to redirect your individual posts from blogger to wordpress. Also, thanks to Tom Sherman. I will try to stick to what these two guys have to tell.

Using the method outlined here, you will be able to

1. Redirect your visitors from your old Blogger blog to your WordPress Blog on your domain

2. Redirect your old posts to new posts on your wordpress blog instead of redirecting them just to your home page of your wordpress blog

3. Do all this in such a way that Google does not penalize you. You also get to transfer your Google Page Rank too. How about that ….. !

Step # 1: Import from Blogger Beta to your WordPress domain

I am assuming that you backed up your blog and Imported to your WordPress domain from the new Blogger or Blogger Beta. If you didn’t do, check out my article on Import from Blogger Beta to WordPress

Step # 2: Modify your Blogger Template to include redirects

Log into your Blogger account. Go to Template and then Edit HTML. Paste the code shown below where you replace http://www.yoursite.com with the root URL of your WordPress Blog

a. Add the code below after <Blogger> in your template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var blog_root=http://www.yoursite.com/;
document.location.href=blog_root;
//–></script>
</MainOrArchivePage>

<ItemPage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var process_page=”http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php”;
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink=”<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”;

newpage+=”?p=”+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
//–></script>
</ItemPage>

b. Add the line shown here somewhere in between the <head> ..</head> tags of your blog

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com/” />

Notice the space between /” and the />

somewhere in between the <head></head> tags like this:

<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com”>
</head>

Step # 3: Prepare your WordPress blog for Redirects

a. Open Notepad. Copy and paste the code given below. Save it as bloggerposts.php or anything else you want and put it in the root location of your wordpress blog. By root, I mean not in any wp-admin or any other folder, but in the root and the link should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php

<?php

require($_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].’/blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
$search_link = $_GET[’p'];
$vars = explode(’/’, $search_link);
$num = count($vars) – 1;
$filename = $vars[$num];
$slug = str_replace(”.html”, “”, $filename);

$SQL = “SELECT posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts AS posts WHERE posts.post_name = ‘$slug’ LIMIT 1″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results(”$SQL”);

if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$found_link = get_permalink($post->ID);
}
}
else
{
$found_link = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
}

?>

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting…</title>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
document.location.href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”;
//–></script>

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”>

</head>
<body>
<h1>Redirecting…</h1>
<p>You can also proceed immediately to <a href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”><?php echo ($found_link); ?></a>.</p>
<p>The main blog URL is <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”>www.yoursite.com</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

All you need to do in the above code is wherever you see http://www.yoursite.com , change it to the root location of your WordPress blog. What this code is doing is taking the URL from Step # 2 and redirect the user to the corresponding entry in your wordpress blog. In case it does not find the corresponding entry, it redirects to the homepage of your blog.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on WordPress
• Brian Gardner Launches Revolution Two Open-Source WordPress Theme
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.7 Soon, Security Upgrade …

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Yup, the upgrade has been done on this site already seems to run very smoothly with no problems for here. WordPress 2.6.2 looks to be a simple minor update, and it ran smoothly with the Update Plug In for WordPress as well. 

For free software wordpress does seem to be very well maintained.

As for my income exploits, I will be publishing my August numbers very soon, stay tuned, but things are looking a little better especially with Google adding Adsense to RSS feeds, this has increased my Adsense traffic by about 100%, which is good to see.

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