We now have CoComments integration on both my and Bobble‘s blog.

Hooray!

You can see my Co Comments here

Like a lot of ex-20six-ers I’ve moved to WordPress and am still getting to grips with it (ooh, the raw power!).

One of the things I miss from 20six is being subscribed to any comments once you’ve made a comment in someone else’s blog. I have a few ideas on how to fix that – but that’s for another day. Today I’m going to tell you how you can keep track of comments.
Continue reading Subscribing to comment feeds in WordPress…

EDIT: NEW VERSION 1.6 added

Here is a Windows version of a 20six blog downloader script I original wrote in PHP.
It should work quite nicely, and it’s good enough to recommend people using Windows give it a go!

Here it is:
Blog Backup for Windows 1.6 (50Kb zip file)

It should run on any recent flavour of windows, although it uses the .NET framework 2.0, which you may need to download from Microsoft (22Mb) if you don’t already have it. Sorry!

Recent Changes:
v1.6
Bug Fix

• Doesn’t crash when given src = "" tags

Continue reading 20six blog archiver for Windows, version 1.6…

Here is an importer for RSS-format archives into WordPress 2.0:

WordPress RSS Archive importer v1.1

It is based on the RSS importer that ships with WordPress 2.0, but it has been changed to work with my 20six backup script and windows tool. These download comments as well as simply posts, and use html ‘div’ tags to indicate where each comment is, whilst keeping the same format as 20six comments (including ‘sweeties awarded’). It also does a better job than 20six at spotting comment spam – it will import them but flag them as ‘needs moderation’.
To use it, download the zip file, unzip and upload rss-archive.php to your WordPress installation at /wp-admin/import/ and then upload your archive-myblog-year.xml files to /import/ and your images to /images/, on your web server. (use any FTP program to do this; the details will vary according to your web site configuration)

Then simply go to the WordPress admin page at /wp-admin/ in your web browser, click on Import and then RSS Archive, and just choose the archive to use! I will be using this to import my old 20six posts to this blog later today, and bobble is going to be using it as well!

To archive your 20six blog:

Use the PHP Archive Script or Windows users may want to use my Windows 20six Backup tool. It doesn’t have full support for tagging comments yet, but it probably will do in a couple of days. (Currently the comments are imported as part of the post, rather than as ‘proper’ WordPress comments)

Updated: version 1.1 now copes better with blogs that use tables in comment formatting, rather than line breaks.

You can download the 20six PHP archiver script here: 20six Blog Backup PHP Script

Full instructions are included, simply install PHP 4.3 or above and then edit the script to supply your username & password.

You can use it with the WordPress RSS Archive Importer to transfer your blog from 20six to WordPress. Yippee!

Alternatively there is a Windows version available as well. The features are nearly the same, but vary as I’m either improving the PHP version (at home on a Mac) or the Windows version (at work on a PC) so they are often out of sync!

As discussed yesterday, Here’s the (mostly) finished script.

It could do with being checked on Windows, I’ll do that at work tomorrow I expect.

You’ll need PHP 4.3 or above, get it from php.net. Then edit BlogBackupScript.php to have your 20six username and password, and run it!

Good luck!

Download here: blog downloader script (52Kb zip file)

Edit: Or try the brand new Windows version here: (requires .Net framework 2) Blog Downloader Windows Version 2 (47Kb zip file) – It now does everything the script version does!
Edit: The windows version of PHP can be downloaded here.

I’ve had a report of timeouts on downloading some blogs. I’ll see if there’s a fix for that. I may have to give up using the weblog API for downloading the posts and just grab the web pages directly (nuts!)

Edit: Important note for Windows

The default install of PHP seems to set up a 30 second time limit on your scripts; this means you can’t download a big blog without changing it. Fortunately it’s quite simple to do so:

1. Find your php.ini file – probably it is in C:\WINDOWS\PHP.INI – and open it in Wordpad or your favourite text editor.
2. Find the line that reads

   max_execution_time = 30

   and change the limit to be 0. This should stop the script from being shut off after 30 seconds.

3. You might also want to put a semi-colon in front of the line starting ‘memory_limit’ to turn off any memory limit.
4. Save php.ini
5. Try your script again – it should now continue downloading your blog.

A good way of checking your blog is to take the XML files and opening them in Internet Explorer or Firefox; this will report an error if the file isn’t complete.
Really big blog?

If you have over 1000 posts in your blog you also need to edit the script slightly; find the line that reads

$numposts = 1000;

and add a 0 on the end to that it will download up to 10,000 posts.