Leaving The Day Job
Leaving the day job through the wonders of affiliate marketing
Make Your Blog Mobile - MoFuse, Winksite and Wordpress Mobile reviewed
Thursday, October 11th, 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I have a rather lovely Nokia N95 mobile phone which sports a powerful (if memory intensive) web browser. I often read web sites on it during my lunch break and I’m always pleased when a website automatically downgrades itself to a mobile-friendly version when it detects my phone.
I wanted the same thing for this blog and thought I’d found it when I got a beta invite for MoFuse via an article at Read/Write Web. MoFuse takes your RSS feed and dynamically generates a mobile version of your website. Unfortunately they don’t know how to parse the RSS from Wordpress properly so all my posts ended up truncated at 80 or so words. After several emails back and forth to their support desk who insisted the problem was with Feedburner despite me sending them the raw XML from Feedburner which clearly has the full post in it, I gave up.
Next to try out was Winksite. This is basically the same idea as MoFuse (and indeed predates MoFuse). This worked out fine and was able to display my posts in full (using exactly the same RSS feed which MoFuse failed with). It’s also quite customizable in terms of design and adds various social network type features. My main problem with it was that I couldn’t see any way easily to integrate with my existing blog. I want people to be able to type in the same URL on whatever device and see the correct version of my site.
Finally I found Andy Moore’s Wordpress Mobile Plugin. It’s a standard Wordpress plugin which as usual is a doddle to set up. It does the automatic detection that I wanted and also has various customization options including the ability to post from your mobile and to add advertising to your mobile blog. You can repay the author for his hard work by configuring a revenue share percentage within the plugin (I’ll do this once I figure out how the AdMob advertising platform works, Andy!)
So there you have it. Next time you’re out and about with your mobile or PDA and have a few minutes to kill check out the mobile version of my blog at the usual address : www.leavingthedayjob.com
Moving from Blogger Blogspot to Wordpress
Sunday, September 30th, 2007I’ve moved this blog away from Blogger to a self-hosted Wordpress installation. Wordpress has all the features I’ve been missing and is generally more modern and expandable blogging platform. But then you knew all that already. The question of why I was using Blogger to start with can be ignored for now.
Here’s a quick couple of notes about what I had to do in the hope that they might help someone one day. I’m assuming a fair degree of familiarity with both Blogger and Wordpress.
I used these instructions as my basis but they needed some tweaking to work with Blogger’s new templates. This method should enable you to migrate your content, redirect your RSS feeds (if you use Feedburner) and redirect your old site pages to your new one. The one thing it can’t do is transfer your Google PageRank as this requires the use of 301 redirects which you can’t do on Blogspot.
1) Obtain the latest version of Wordpress. Create a database and install as described in the Wordpress documentation
2) Log in to your Wordpress admin panel. Click Manage - Import - Blogger. Enter your Blogger login details. Wait for a bit and all your posts should be copied over from Blogger to your new site.
3) (Optional) Assuming that you are using Feedburner for your RSS feed: login to Feedburner and change the source of your feed to your new site eg www.yourdomain.com/feed . Install the FeedSmith plugin - this will automagically redirect requests for your RSS feed to your Feedburner feed instead.
4) This is the fun bit. You need to redirect traffic from your old Blogger blog to your new Wordpress blog.
4a) Download the from_blogger.php file from here and save it to the root of your Wordpress site.
4b) Paste the following code into your Blogger template (I put it just after the opening <body> tag)
<script language='javascript'><!-- var process_page="http://www.yournewwebsite.com/from_blogger.php"; var newpage=process_page; var oldlink=document.location.href; newpage+="?p="+oldlink; newpage=newpage.toLowerCase(); document.location.href=newpage; //--></script>
4c) Paste the following into your Blogger tempate’s <head>element
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.yournewwebsite.com" />4d) Paste the following somewhere into your Blogger template’s <body> element
<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 350px; z-index: 5;'> <p><strong>My blog has moved! Redirecting…</strong></p> <p>You should be automatically redirected. If not, visit <a href='http://www.yournewwebsite.com/'>http://www.yournewwebsite.com</a> and update your bookmarks.</p> </div>
In theory what should happen is that visitors to your old blog will be redirected to the same article on the new site. The way it works is by capturing the last part of your Blogger page’s url eg my-great-post.html and searching for a post with the slug ‘my-great-post’ in your Wordpress blog. Unfortunately Blogger and Wordpress don’t always agree on how to create that slug so you may need to go through each post individually and check that the slugs match up. To do this go to Manage - Posts and Edit each one. The slug is displayed on the right hand side of the edit page under ‘Post slug’.
I’ve tried to write this as quickly as possible while the process is still fresh in my mind but in rushing I’ve probably not explained myself very clearly. Post in the comments if you have problems and I’ll try to assist.
