erica's joys :)

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I am trying to import my old blog entries from Wordpress to Blogger. I did a test run to see how the script behaves. Some caveats I've found thus far:

• No control over what gets imported. If you import things that are in draft status in Wordpress, they will be in published status in Blogger. However, control over what to import is being worked on.
  
• The script uses XMLRPC which means if you have characters in your posts that XML can't parse, it will throw errors.
• Even though the posts are imported correctly in the blog, they still show up at the top of the feed. This isn't a fault of the the script, nor is it a big deal, its just kind of annoying. (Note to AG: I'm not even about to touch Vista again, that was an old post.)

I've held off on the full import until controls are inserted for what posts get moved. I'm not a fan of my old ramblings in draft status being added to this blog. You probably wouldn't want to read them anyhow. ;)

Since I've moved to New York, I haven't traveled *anywhere* which is a big change from the amount of traveling I used to do when I lived in Atlanta. While I like visiting new (to me) locales, it's nice to be in one place for a while. That's about to change as I'm headed to Italy in the not so distant future. It will be my first time in Europe since I was 2 or 3 years old and I'm really excited about it. I'll be in Italy long enough to visit some other countries so I'd like to hear where you 78 readers (growth!) think I should go. My main interests are taking cool pictures and visiting historical sites but I'd like to do a wee bit of shopping while I'm there as well. Of course I'll be sampling the food and hopefully scoring some good bottles of wine to take home.

Last but not least, I've been thinking of changing the template of this blog. I'm not sure whether I want to change a few colors here and there or just overhaul the whole thing. If you notice template weirdness that's a good indicator that I'm tinkering with it. I'm also trying some new things with the feed. If you find any of the changes annoying, sorryforya! I kid, I kid. If you find something annoying by all means let me know and I'll see what I can do. :)

Labels: migration, travel

So contrary to the date of the first entry of this blog, I am not a total n00b blogger. To be truthful, I started this blog on Blogger back when I thought I might have a chance to work @ Google. It's wise to know the products of the company you're interviewing with and all. Before that, I'd been using WordPress and before that Movable Type and before that Xanga and before that greymatter. It stands to reason that if I'm on my fifth blogging platform, I'd have entries going back before March of 2006, right? Well unfortunately Blogger doesn't provide a way to import old entries from other platforms, so my entries back to September 2003 are locked away in WordPress land.

Enter Yichao Zhang who created a WordPress to Blogger importer. I'd been waiting for some enterprising person to use the Blogger API to create an importer. Truth be told, this post started out in December as a request for someone to do so. So, I'm going to try this out. If all is successful, you should see old posts appearing in the archives soon-ish.

Moving on, I would like to know when and how VOSS became the "it" water. I started seeing it in hotel rooms I went to and couldn't comprehend how a bottle of water could cost $8. Now I see pictures of Lindsay Lohan walking around carrying the stuff and I wonder where this stuff came from. I've never seen commercials for it so has it become popular by the design of its bottle (which is cool, I admit) and its placing in hotels?