I had decided to transfer my old blogs (from late 2009 and 2010) from Drupal to this WP-powered site during Christmas, and now it’s done. I started off with a sql dump (password lost so I couldn’t access it in Phpmyadmin) and the first step was to get a program which was able to read it. After some research, I tried Word and Excel, and to my surprise both worked, even if the result was not perfect in any way.

Then I needed to get the date for the blogs, there was just one long 11 digit number which I guessed was some sort of a code for the date and time. I found the Unix time converter which was able to convert the time code into a date and time, one date at a time. I’m sure there is an algorithm out there that could be used in Excel for converting several dates at the same time, or?

Finally there was the cutting and pasting of blog posts from the Word document, one by one. Word retained the formatting and HTML code but Drupal had put some extra characters there which needed to be erased. The date and time I also had to enter manually.

All this took me almost ten hours, but what are holidays for? Now I’ll use WordPress in the foreseeable future, together vid the Canvas theme from Woothemes.

WordPress är underbart! Jag startade min bloggarkarriär i februari 2007 och bloggade i några år på WordPress.com under bloggadressen phronimos.wordpress.com. Sedan skaffade jag en VPS (virtual private server) och började blogga i Drupal istället i 14 månader. VPS:en var litet jobbig att adminstrera för mej som inte kan nånting om Apache och inte riktigt har motivation att lära mej det heller, så jag gick över från den till webbhotellet Webhotelli.fi som har fungerat riktigt bra i några år.

Problemet är att jag skötte överförandet av filerna litet klumpigt, så jag har bara en rå sql-fil med innehållet i den bloggen som jag visserligen får in i Excel men inte på något lätt sätt överfört till den här installationen av WordPress. Bilderna kom inte heller med. Så under julhelgen kanske jag försöker rekonstruera texterna i den bloggen manuellt. Men innehållet i den första wordpressbloggen (förutom bilderna) imorterades verkligt elegant med export/importfunktionen i den här installationen av WordPress. Trevligt att ha en dokumentation över vad man tänkt nån gång. Och ATT man tänkt…

Being a somewhat restless soul I’m reconfiguring the design and content of my primary website once again. This time no change in platform – I’m pleased with WordPress, but I think I’ll change the theme from Suffusion to Canvas. Prepare for some maybe not very eye-pleasing experiments in the near future. Wish I had a designer’s eye.

When reading recent blog posts this morning I noted that two prominent bloggers have posts which are questioning the read-write/social web.

First, it’s George Siemens who after testing out Google + for some weeks realizes that there is too much hype around social media. He writes:

Social media is good for event-based activities. But terrible when people try to make it do more []

Hmm. Partly right, says me. But I still believe there is a lot of untapped potential in using social media for sense-making and for deep cooperation and collaboration. It’s just that the media are so new that humanity has not yet found so many productive ways of utilizing them. Or rather, the productive ways have not yet been put to use by most people who still are just playing around with the nice, new toy. This George knows of course, because social media has a definite role to play in his theory of connectivism. What he is more annoyed about is that some people claim that social media have far more potential and power than they actually have. Well, time will tell.

What is a bit surprising (surprising because George is a non-traditionalist in academic circles) he emphasizes the dualist view of emotions and intellect in this context:

Social media=emotions.
Blogging/writing/transparent scholarship=intellect.

Maybe he only had a bad day?

Second, its Paul Carr who writes for TechCrunch who takes a look at what web 2.0 was ”supposed” to do:

The Internet — particularly “web 2.0″, with its communities and tagging and reuniting and friending and liking — was supposed to civilize us all.

but what it sometimes does is getting hijacked by ruthless financial interests. He concludes by giving a recommendation to the investors and entrepreneurs:

What’s cool is keeping your soul, whatever the financial cost.

That conclusion resonates especially well with me today, formally my last day as a senior lecturer, but for different reasons. I’m trying to save my soul from ruthless bureaucrats and administrators, whatever the financial cost for myself.

Thanks to an invitation by David Gurteen I finally have access to Google+ and playing around a bit. More about the results at some point, but right now it seems as if G+ and LinkedIn could be the basis for my webbased communication during the foreseeable future.

My Google+ page is here.

Jag registerade just domännamnet raseb.org. Tänk att det var ledigt.
Jag har några tankar kring hur det kan användas i framtiden.