Tag: Blogging

Looking Back at 14 Years of Deuts.NET

I’ve just finished migrating my blog from WordPress.com to Google Cloud Platform. Along this process, I needed to do some housekeeping, and check for broken links. Thus, the Broken Link Checker plugin.

I was particularly interested in intra-site links especially images that might have been broken through the years. But I was greeted as well by broken external links, hundreds of them:

Websites, blogs, and pages that are relevant at that time, but eventually faded into obscurity. Those are the websites that Deuts.NET survived. If you look at the sidebar, you’ll see the long list of archive links. That makes up 14 and a half years of Deuts.NET. Looking forward to 14 more years to come.

What Happens Now to Tumblr?

It has been like 3 months since Matt Mullenweg announced that Automattic acquired Tumblr. Until now, though, I have not seen any developments in my Tumblr Dashboard, nor any announcement for plans by Automattic on what to actually do with Tumblr. So what now? What current Tumblr functionalities will be dropped, and which WordPress features will be added?

Happy 10 Years!

10-years

Today marks the 10th year of existence of Deuts.NET. I registered this domain name on May 17, 2006 — check the whois.

I’m sure we’ve seen better days in blogging, when I used to post a lot more often, and daily traffic was much better. Perhaps, those were the glory days of blogging — before Facebook even came around. Continue reading

I thank the guest bloggers

guest-bloggerDisclaimer: This is not yet the end of Deuts.NET. This site is nowhere near that end.

Deuts.NET has been in existence for quite some time now — more than 8 years. Along the way, I had friends who willingly helped and contributed to the success (I would like to believe that way) of this site. Thus, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

Shout out goes to Raymond, Sherwin, Marky and Cliff. Continue reading

Ghost – just a blogging platform

ghost_blogging

From the Features page:

A beautifully designed platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing.

Ghost is an Open Source application which allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It’s simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.

This is exactly what I have been referring to when I said WordPress has somehow become bloated. I just wish I can spend less time making my blog work and more time blogging.

I hope the Ghost project pans out — and they offer a way to import a WordPress blog. 😛

Migrating from Tumblr to WordPress

Don’t get me wrong, Tumblr is great. But with my so many experience with the different blogging engine and even other CMS’s, I always find myself going back to realizing that WordPress is way better.

It had been said many times that it is very important to choose the right blogging platform from the very start. But what do you do when you find yourself making the same mistake as others when they started out their blog?

Here are two ways you can import your posts from Tumblr to WordPress. For purposes of our test, I had more than 1,300 posts at my Tumblr blog that I tried migrating.

Tumblr2WordPress Utility

The process basically involves visiting the utility page over at benapps.net, key in your tumblr url, tweak some settings, and download the WXR (WordPress eXtended Rss) file (in .xml extension) —which by the way is the same format when you export a WordPress blog.

Then heading over to the WordPress blog you want to migrate your posts into, you would import the same just as you would a regular WordPress WXR file.

The results:

  • 1,218 posts were successfully imported, that leaves me missing with more than 100 posts — more or less 90% successful import;
  • As expected, comments were not imported. But that is something we can have a work around later with the Disqus plugin for WordPress (I was using Disqus as well in my Tumblr blog);
  • Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have blank titles — that leaves too many polishing yet to be done;
  • Media are still hosted at Tumblr — media files weren’t imported;
  • Tags are properly reflected in the new WordPress blog;
  • WordPress can very well handle post redirection from the original Tumblr permalink structure;

The Posterous Route

If you have not yet known, Posterous has a feature that can import your whole Tumblr blog. On the other hand, WordPress.com has a feature to import from a Posterous blog. Using this route, and the same Tumblr numbers from above, we have noted:

  • Only around 700 posts were successfully imported — a dismal 50% turnout;
  • Comments were not as well imported;
  • Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have common post titles, i.e., “Untitled” — that leaves much more polishing to be done;
  • Media files were actually imported into WordPress.com servers;
  • Actual tags were not imported. Instead, posts were categorized accordingly as Photo, Audio, Video, etc.
  • A new permalink structure, different than the original Tumblr structure that included post ID’s — this would surely lead to bad links;

Conclusion

So far, these two are the only viable solution to migrating from Tumblr to WordPress. Either way can be a pain, especially if you already have a huge blog at Tumblr. Either way, you pay a price for not starting out with the right blogging platform — charge to experience. But in the end of the day, you have to do it if you really need to.

We just hope someday there’ll be a better and smoother solution to help us Tumblr users out migrating to WordPress.

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is Here!

The moment we WordPress users have been waiting for has finally come — the release of WordPress 3.0 codenamed Thelonious. Deuts.NET is of course already upgraded to the latest version.

Watch this video to know more about the new features of WordPress 3.0.

[wpvideo BQtfIEY1 w=400 h=224]

So far, the list of new great features we’re most excited about and would love to employ in this blog (and other blog projects as well) are:

  • A new default theme, called Twenty-Ten, paves the way to be an example on how to take advantage of the new features;
  • Custom background support lets you easily enable your heavily customized theme to support custom backgrounds and custom headers. Moreover, you can assign further custom headers for each post;
  • Multi-site Capabilities and WPMU Codebase Merge is probably is the main feature of this new release. I hope to turn this blog into a multi-site one and utilizing the domain mapping plugin would probably consolidate my other projects into one big Deuts Network site;
  • Custom Post Types reduces the need to fiddle around with custom fields. This brings WordPress to be much more of a CMS.

Some other features are, well, add to the bloat. We’ll just continue to wish for the development team to develop a WordPress Core only and that other features can be easily turned on or off.

Chyrp: All Good Things Come to End

UPDATE: Chyrp has been revived, and version 2.1 has been released.

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is powered by PHP and has very powerful theme and extension engines, so you can personalize it however you want.

This is what was used to be contained in the official website of Chyrp, before it actually became unavailable.

Chyrp basically is a lightweight tumblelogging engine based on PHP and MySql. It’s a tumblelogging just like Tumblr that you can install in your own server. It’s lightweight in the sense that basically the essential or core functions are installed out of the box, to minimize use of server resources and space. I used to install it in some of my projects just to post short snippets of text, photos, audios, videos, quotes and links.

However, just two days ago, the main developer, Alex Suraci, in the Chyrp blog, posted an out of ordinary news: Chyrp is Dead; Long Live Chyrp.

As you may have noticed, progress on Chyrp has grinded to a halt, and has been in that state for a long while now. It is no longer maintained. A few people have volunteered to step in, which I appreciate, but no progress has been made. Throughout this project’s timeline I can count the repeated contributors on one hand (whom I am eternally grateful for; Twig, a lot of internal refactoring, and many fixes are the result of their hard work). It’s unhealthy for a project to rely too much on one maintainer; when they lose interest the whole thing crumbles down. This is essentially what’s happened. People keep switching to, finding, or using Chyrp, which just isn’t a good idea for me to encourage given Chyrp’s current state. So now I’m announcing it’s death.

Chyrp will always be available at GitHub. Any contributors can feel free to fork my repository; I’d be more than happy to accept patches and security fixes, or add you as a committer if you seem trustworthy and active enough. But I will no longer be working on this project, I probably won’t be in the IRC channel anymore, and I can no longer guarantee that this site will stick around through server moves and such. Unless a miracle happens and Chyrp development springs from the grave (which will be judged by actions, not words).

Chyrp has been a part of my life since I first learned to program. It grew out of what is now a “hello world”: writing a blog engine. It has spanned a decent chunk of my critically-thinking life. Thanks for being a part of this project, whether you were a user or a contributor.

We, the users of this great web application (other than WordPress, of course), are saddened by this news. We would have rather see Chyrp through till the end than witness its untimely demise. What happens now to my current projects that use Chyrp? Well, maybe I’ll just continue with the latest version and pray that it is not hacked.

UPDATE: Chyrp has been revived, and version 2.1 has been released.