Web site monitoring is an important part of operating a web site, and it allows you to know when your site is down.  Fortunately, it’s easy to set up and you can monitor your web site for free using a web site that I have just found thanks to a post I found on ShanKrila that discusses an upgrade to an external website monitoring service.

After you build and deploy your web site, are you going to monitor it to ensure that you know it is up and running?  If your web site or blog goes down, are you going to know?

Monitoring your web site is part of your duties as  the web master of your domain.  If you don’t know when your site goes down, then who will?  Your customers?  Your boss?  Heh, the last thing you’d want is your boss finding out that the company site is down before you do.  That is never a good thing.

You can help to make yourself the first to know if there is a site outage by signing up with Montastic Website Monitoring Service.  It’s free, and really easy to set up monitoring for a web site.

I signed up for this service and loaded a number of my own sites into my profile.  Whenever one goes down, I will get an email alerting me to the outage so that I can take action on it in some way.  Montastic.com checks each web site about every 10 minutes.  Of course, if the load is great, that time may be a bit longer.  For a free web site monitoring service though, you can’t beat this.

You are able to monitor up to 100 web sites for free, and each site is checked from two different locations for redundancy.  On that same note, if you already have web site monitoring in place, you might consider this service for redundancy to your monitoring as well.

The Montastic site monitoring service also allows you to specify multiple recipients to receive alert emails also.  This is rather handy for teams of developers as you can imagine.

I highly recommend using this service if you are concerned about knowing when your web site is down.

• 1 Comment

After I migrated to WordPress, I opened a post and was unable to create a hyperlink. When I tried, I selected some text and clicked the Insert/edit Link button and instead of getting the insert/edit link screen, I was presented with a download dialog. For some reason, the form would not display in the window that was so clearly defined for it.

Whenever I try to edit an image, I also receive the same treatment.

This same failure occurs on different browsers, however in IE I don’t get a file download, just a blank, white area like you see in the image above.

This failure also occurs on different computers, which leads me to believe that there is something wrong with my install of WordPress, or perhaps one of the plugins I’m using is causing this problem.

So while I’m continuing to work on this problem, I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone who frequents my blog knows how to resolve this issue.

I’ll give $10 to the first person that can tell me exactly how to fix this. Leave a response below if you think you know why this happens. If that leads to me fixing the issue, I’ll give you $10. Simple. Ask anything you need to.

UPDATE!

I made a video to show the issue in better detail

• 14 Comments

I recently migrated my entire blog to a new host and a new blogging platform. While doing the transition, I took notes, analyzed my options and made the jump from BlogEngine to WordPress just last weekend. This post addresses one problem I encountered along the way.

One problem I encountered while performing migration tests from BlogEngine to WordPress were the image references in the posts. Left unaccounted for, any post images on WordPress after the migration will be using a reference that was good for BlogEngine but fails for WordPress. So something needs to be done to them unless you don’t mind redoing each and every post that contains an image in it. I know I don’t want to waste that time, so here’s how I worked around this little problem.

The Problem

In BlogEngine image references look like this:

domainname/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/some-folder/some-image.jpg

In WordPress, an image reference looks like this:

domainname/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/some-image.jpg

After you migrate your blog from BlogEngine to WordPress using the BlogML import tool in WordPress, all images will be referring to image.axd and not wp-content. So how can we fix this problem? Easy, we need to modify the BlogML data file before we upload it into WordPress. So let’s have some fun and perform a little string surgery.

The Solution

There’s an easy fix for this, and all it requires is identifying where the physical images are and modifying the references in the BlogML data file.

BlogEngine stores the image files for posts within the App_Data\Files folder. I happen to use Windows Live Writer, so all of my images went even further into another folder. So why am I explaining all this?

These files will need to be FTP’d to the destination host and placed under your /wp-content/uploads/ folder. You can move these ahead of time and have them sitting there waiting for you to perform the import process. Just grab the root-most folder that contains the images and move them over to the new host.

Once the files are on the new host, give one a test to make sure that you can still access the images you want. Just type in a direct reference like http://www.waynejohn.com/wp-content/blah blah/someimage.jpg into a browser, and it should come up if everything is alright.

Plus, once you have the image reference in the browser, you can refer to it while performing a quick find/replace operation in your favorite text editor. If the domain name is changing, include a quick sweep for your domain name also, as part of the string surgery. Just in case. You never know.

Here are the steps to migrate your BlogEngine post images to a WordPress blog.

• Find the root image folder and FTP the folder and all it’s contents to the /wp-content/uploads/ folder.
• In the BlogML data file, replace all instances of “/image.axd?picture=” with “/wp-content/uploads/” in the BlogML file.
• Perform any other string manipulation operations you’d like to perform in the BlogML data file.
• Import the BlogML data file to WordPress

That’s all there is to it. At this point you should be able to view your WordPress blog and see that the post images are indeed there and they are pointing to a reference located on your WordPress host. Everything should be looking good, as far as post images are concerned.

If you see any way to make this more effective or easier, let me know. Unfortunately the BlogML does not include the code it would need to migrate the images. At least not that I was able to discern, but I didn’t go digging in it either. Perhaps the process would add too much overhead, but I’m sure there are ways around that.

It would make things so much more easy, and this post completely unnecessary. So I guess I should just keep my trap shut.

• 5 Comments

Over the weekend I followed through on my plan to migrate my blog over to WordPress.  My migration is now complete, for the most part.

I spent most of my day on Saturday reviewing every single aspect of the old blog and making sure that I have a plan of attack for the migration.  I tried to plan as best I could for each problem I might encounter, and did pretty darn well if I say so myself.  I’ll have more details about the migration coming out in the next few days while I put everything together and try to make sense of all my notes.

So here’s a recap of what’s new:

• New Host!  I’m now hosting WayneJohn.com over at DreamHost
• New Blog Platform!  Of course you know I’m running WordPress now.
• New Theme!  yeah, that sort of goes along with things doesn’t it
• New Categories!  I had to get rid of the old ones, they were just killing me once I figured out the best way to use categories.  I’ll share my thoughts about categories in a future post.
• New Approach!  I’ve decided to scale back a lot of the stuff I display on my homepage and post pages.  Less is more is the idea here.

With all the new items above, and the fact that I’m still wrapping my hands around PHP, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.  It should be a lot of fun for me though.  I have this thing for puzzles…

I am currently experiencing an issue with WordPress where I can’t create a hyperlink without going into code view, which is more a pain in the ass than anything else, but it is the reason there aren’t any links in this post.

I simply wanted to invite you to explore the site, let me know what you think and share your thoughts with me about the new look and all that goes with it.

I have much more to share about the migration, and like I said, there are several posts forthcoming that speak directly to the migration and what I went through.

I feel good about the move, and also feel a bit more energized about blogging now.  It’s nice getting a face lift.  Feels good.

Cheers!

Wayne

PS: I tried my best to ensure there are no bugs.  If you do happen to find any, please let me know.  Thanks!

• 7 Comments

When you export all your post data from BlogEngine and try to import the data file into WordPress using Aaron Lerch’s BlogML import class, I found that it does not include any of the commentators URL’s, which means all those comments that my readers left would no longer be a link. I find that very unacceptable.

The BlogML import class also left out all tags on my 350 posts. I don’t want to go back through all those posts creating new tags for them after I perform the transition, so I decided that I would spend some time modifying the BlogML class so that these two issues would be resolved.

After some testing and tweaking, I was able to accommodate both of my requirements and make the transition from BlogEngine to WordPress a little more nice.

This version does everything that Aaron’s BlogML class does, with my two additions included.

Installation Instructions

Simply copy to BlogML.php file into your /wp-admin/import/ folder. Once you do, you will see the BlogML import format as a selection on the Tools – Import screen.

Install the Php.XPath class into the same folder as the BlogML class.

Download

You can download the updated class from one of my other sites until I have a chance to make the migration and place the file into a directory on my new host.

Download the Updated BlogML Import Class for WordPress

You will also need

Php.XPath library available from SourceForge (Get version 3.5)

Support

I’ve tried my best to ensure that everything happens smoothly with the import, however if you have any issues, please feel free to leave a comment here or contact me.

• 2 Comments