Finally, after quite a bit of noodling around, I have managed to export my WordPress blog and import it successfully into Drupal. To those with a life, this is perhaps not so impressive. But given Drupal’s quite astonishingly unintuitive user interface I am quite pleased with myself.
If anyone wants to do something similar, the module can be downloaded here. It was the same one that blanked out the browser first time round, but restarting seemed to solve that snafu. Then you have to make sure you map the content to a user. Yes, I know – I zoned out too. And that’s why Drupal said “import successful” but no content appeared. So – there’s a crucial “create user” button you have to activate before it works.
And now? I have to start creating a user interface. That’s the weekend gone. The real downside is that last night I actually dreamed about PHP code strings. You have no idea how disturbing that is…
Lovely to see this video of the Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, featuring what looks like a specially commissioned piece of stopframe animation. With a semi-experienced eye, I can see that, while the production design is nice and the storyboard works well, the animation itself is pretty simple for the most part – no interaction between characters really, no lip synch, no walking around and only the handle-turning/sky-rotating business looking like it might have been a bit more complicated to do.
All the same, they’ve done some nice water effects that are clearly not digital [along with fire, one of the top two problematic things to achieve in stop motion] and the whole thing works really well with the track. Just goes to show what you can achieve even if you’re not Aardman…
On the day that Freelance Unbound is included on the Journalism.co.uk blogroll for the first time (and in the top slot no less! Though only as it’s the most recent) I checked out the WordPress web statistics to find – today’s was the lowest traffic since the start of March. Hmm.
Well, I sort of expected a mini spike in traffic, once I realised it had been included, but it seems not. Interesting how that goes – maybe Journalism.co.uk users don’t spend much time on the blog roll, preferring the news and job pages. (Or maybe something will happen this evening.)
Either way, it’s interesting. As it happens, I’m particularly interested in the ways in which people find their way around the internet and the blogosphere. Are blogs read mainly by bloggers? (Which would mean the WordPress site itself was more important for building an audience). Or do people find odd relevant posts via a Google search and then maybe stay on board if they find the rest of the content compelling?
I wonder how much crossover there is between those who enjoy what the media has always done – news, features, analysis – and those who enjoy the partisan and largely non-professional cloud of comment and interaction in blogs. Maybe not so much.
I have been wondering what I might do as a first run for a basic Drupal site, basically to give me a project to help me learn the CMS.
“Could I migrate WordPress to it, using xml?” I wondered, geekily.
Yes! For there on the excellent Drupal site was a link to a Drupal module that would do this very thing.
Thereupon, I spent a bit of time installing the module, and all the other bits that you always have to add to make anything work with a tech installation. How pleased with myself I was – for I was king of the journo geeks!
Then of course, after clicking the update button, I refreshed the screen and found … nothing. Yes – just a blank white browser window. How my inflated sense of self esteem deflated rapidly.
After some cursing and turning the Apache server on and off, I figured I should just delete the module. Which of course instantly solved the problem.
So now I’m back to square one. I reckon it’s all because there is some version clash between the module and the 6.x Drupal I have installed. More fun this evening maybe. Unless I get a life…
Today’s first year Farnham blogging workshop almost collapsed under the weight of UCA’s unspeakably terrible IT infrastructure. Note to the college – SORT IT OUT. None of the students’ Macs could actually launch software, and took about ten minutes to log in. If they could at all. That’s how bad it was.
But, after dealing with major IT suckage, we managed to put together a few video interview clips on that perennial favourite topic, Michael Jackson’s extended O2 residency. After cobbling together a group iMovie cut on the one machine we could get working my laptop, after that one fell over too, we uploaded it to YouTube and the code should be embedded on the various student blogs before too long.
The whole exercise took no more than three hours – most of which was spent waiting for the beach ball of death to stop spinning. I will never get those hours of my life back. Thanks UCA.
The poll question was (roughly): “What do you think of the news that Michael Jackson is extending his O2 residency to 45 nights, and would you buy a ticket?” Things we learned in the workshop
Good subjects for quick online video are:
Video diary of students doing something interesting (quirky, amusing, dangerous, unusual)
Vox pop about a hot topic (Jade Goody, Michael Jackson or, you know, something serious)
Interview someone – this video interviews the head of a tech company at an IT conference. You could do it at a gaming event, a fashion show, a gig – whatever.
Use iMovie or Movie Maker for a very quick cut of a simple video clip – easy to do and easy to export to web-compressed Quicktime movie. You can then upload this to YouTube and paste the embed code into your site/blog.
Technology: any digital camera with a movie setting that can shoot AVI clips [most do these days]. Any phone with a video camera that lets you transfer the clip to computer. A small camcorder such as the Flip video camera.
You can also broadcast live via your web site. Use Qik to broadcast via video phone (there’s a limited number of compatible phones as yet), or Ustream to broadcast from your PC or laptop. Then embed the saved video files in a post or page later.
Via Richard Kendall: From Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog comes this quite useful slideshow on producing web content.
He can’t spell scanability, mind, and forgets that when quick is used as an adverb it needs an “ly” at the end.
But some useful pointers on the need for clarity, brevity and, crucially, interactivity.
Despite the fact the the internet is essentially destroying [if creatively] my profession, I love it. Mainly because in the space of a few days it can create links between me and a journalist in Leeds via a publication I’d never heard of and a blog that he’d never heard of.
So thanks to Simon O’Hare for taking the trouble to come up with effectively a letter to the editor in the comments section to my admittedly slightly snarky post about his analysis of publishing’s woes.
Mostly a comment to a blog won’t make the news, but hey – I’m quite new here. And as this is partly a learning and teaching tool I’m actually pretty pleased that the interconnectivity side of web journalism seems to be working just fine.
Of course, that and a couple of quid will buy me a cup of coffee. Making money out of all this is another matter.
In that respect, O’Hare’s piece is pretty on the mark:
Almost anyone can write a blog from their bedroom – but this begs the question of whether there is a place for the paid journalist
Spent part of the weekend installing Apache and mySQL on my laptop to turn it into a “web development platform”. If you’d have spoken to me even a year ago, I would never have believed I could have written such a thing.
It was kind of easier than you’d think, given that most of my experience with computers has been of the cuddly Mac OS variety (apart from some possibly useful exposure to MS-DOS back in the 18th century late 1980s).
That’s largely due to the impeccably well-produced documentation for the XAMPP software that does the heavy lifting of the installation. But I did have a WTF? moment during the process.
Step 1 – “Simply click on the link below.” Yep, that’s fine.
Step 2 – “Doubleclick to start the installation.” Mmm – with you so far.
Step 3 – “After installing simply type in the following commands to start XAMPP for MacOS X:
Go to a Terminal shell and login as the system administrator root:sudo su
To start XAMPP simply call this command:/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/mampp start
Step 4 – “uh…”
Thankfully we have the internet, and as long as you are prepared to sit by the computer cursing for 15 minutes while you sift through the sluice of the web’s variable quality advice, you are almost bound to find the solution you need.
So – after a bit of experimentation with Apple’s Terminal application [for which even the Wikipedia entry linked to here is nigh incomprehensible], I managed to get the web server up and running and then went crazy and installed Joomla, Drupal and, for a bit of light relief, the full WordPress software.
I’ll probably migrate this blog to fully hosted WordPress in time, mainly to get control of the template and add some plugin goodness. First I get to learn how to create a site in one of the oh-so popular modular CMS systems around.
I had thought I’d start with Joomla, as it’s supposed to be easier to learn. But then, for that reason, I thought I’d actually try to crack Drupal first. It’s the system that publishing companies would probably opt for if they go for a non-custom CMS, which makes it more useful to know from a freelance perspective.
I’ll update with progress reports as I start to make any…
Joshua Benton at the NiemanJournalismLab believes journalism is, effectively, screwed because no one these days will pay for anything online, especially the young who have grown up with the free online content.
If you’ve grown up in a free online environment, paying for digital content isn’t just a pain — it’s unthinkable.
This is absolutely true. Shockingly – at least to oldies who think paying good money for things like music and newspapers isn’t utterly outlandish – the lives of the young students he interviewed at an upscale college revolved absolutely around Facebook. Yet they were totally unprepared to pay any money at all for it. (Which is kind of OK, because Mark Zuckerberg is kind of totally unprepared to make money from it too, as noted here).
So where does this leave us? (Apart from terrified of looming unemployment).
I think Chris Anderson has it about right in Wired magazine. He argues that ‘free’ is the future of business:
Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money
The question for us is whether that someone is us (journalists/publishers) in an environment where not only content is free, but also the costs of publishing – and video- and audio-casting are also close to zero.
The key is to change our thinking about what journalism and publishing are, as fast as media technology is itself changing. But once you get over the idea that journalism involves being paid a monthly salary plus benefits by a big corporation to work 9-6 on material that you don’t even know anyone is consuming are gone I think.
It’s a big challenge for everyone in media now. But look at the Commoncraft video production team – basically two people in a Seattle basement who have seized on the web’s new free video publishing services to start a video training company.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE&hl=en&fs=1]
Bite-sized videos offer a beginner’s guide to the slew of social networking and other web offerings in order to build usage. All of this stuff is free – the sites, the videos, the video hosting – yet there is an income to be had from corporate users or those who want to use them in training.
So – you want to make money from free? Be creative. Create value. But don’t whine. Nobody likes a whiner…
[HT David Thomas]
: 
: 
: 