myGUIDE

After months of inactivity, myGUIDE is now back with a new look and running on a different weblog platform. Yes, you read it right, I changed my blog platform from Serendipity to WordPress. This means that although I have migrated all my previous posts to WordPress, previous links will no longer work since Serendipity and WordPress have different link structure. Now if you’re looking for a particular post, you can still find it here. Just use the search box to locate it.

How did I do it? It was quite easy. Thanks to Windows Live Writer (WLW). But before taking this approach, be warned that this may not be appropriate for your case. This worked for me because myGUIDE is relatively new and has only a small number of blog entries and I’ve been using WLW to post entries to this blog. A Serendipity importer plugin is already available for WordPress. So maybe you’re better off using the plugin. But if you want an alternative approach, you can try this one.

The first thing to do is to create a weblog account in WLW to access your Serendipity-based blog, if you have not done it yet. Then setup another account in WLW to access your WordPress blog. After doing this, you’re ready to go. Simply read your blog entries, one at a time, from your old blog using WLW, then switch to your new blog, and click the Publish button to publish the entry you just retrieved. It is that easy! You can also use WLW to create the relevant categories in your new blog. You can even set the published date so that you can keep the original date of your posts.

But there are limitations to this approach. First, you will lose all your comments. WLW will not read the comments associated to each post.  Second, WLW sometimes will not download the images in the post. Instead it will just get the link of the image from your original blog and use this link in the new one. Thus if you’ll remove your old blog, the images will also disappear. Finally, if you have many entries, transferring all of them can take some time since you have to manually repeat the process of reading your previous posts from Serendipity then publishing it to WordPress. Luckily for me, I have only 15 entries so this was not an issue.

And that’s it!

Interested in creating your own search engine? Try google custom search engine (CSE)! With google’s CSE, you can customized your search experience, including in the search only sites that are relevant to you. You can also host both the search box and search results in your site. You can even create custom search engine on the fly. (For example, creating a search engine for sites included in your blogroll.) For those interested, you can visit this webpage on CSE’s API.

It’s really easy to configure but you need to have a google account. If you already have one, follow the link above, login, and start building your own search engine. I already made one and called it Search Philippines! SP! can be found in this URL: http://search.philippinestoday.net/ This search engine only includes Philippine-related websites (well, that’s the target). For now, I have only a couple of websites included. I plan to include more Philippine news sites, pinoy blogs, etc.  Here is the image of the site.

What is this for users? Since the number of sites to search are limited and focused (say, only for Philippine news sites), users will be able to get more relevant search results as compared to using the entire google search engine. For website owners, this will give more visibility to your website. For instance, search the term ‘phpwebsite’ in google. This blog (myguide.bagarinao.com) appears in the 5th page. Search it again in my custom search engine Search Philippines! This blog is now on the first page.  This is because I included my blog in the list of websites for Search Philippines.

Any way, if you are interested in helping build Search Philippines! or want to include an SP! search box in your website or blog, drop me a note! It will be great to have our very own custom search engine.

In my previous post, I outlined my unsuccessful attempt to use windows live writer (WLW) to connect to the XmlRpc server of PhpWebsite’s article manager module. I experimented using both the Metaweblog API and the Movable Type API but with no success. When attempting to post an entry, WLW always returned the following error message “The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.” However, the entry did get posted. Republishing the same entry would create a new post instead of replacing the one posted earlier. And each time, WLW gave the same error. 

I searched the Internet for possible solutions. I found out that the problem is quite common and not unique to PhpWebsite (PWS).  The same problem has also been observed in other blogging platforms such as wordpress. Luckily for wordpress users, there are already solutions posted in several blogs for some of the problems with WLW. Unfortunately for me, the solutions were not applicable for PWS. I could not even find other sites or blogs talking about PWS and WLW except this one. It seems I am the only soul trying to do this in the entire world wide web.

Since most of the websites I’m maintaining are powered by PWS, I thought it is worth the time and effort to figure out the cause of the problem. I am also in need of a good editing application that I can use with PWS. The provided text editor is only good for basic editing and not for more advanced formatting. For instance, using tables in entries can really take a lot of time. Anyway, since I am using WLW in my other blogs, I thought it would be great if I could also use it in my PWS-based websites.

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