update struggles

What is going on? No updates this year, no posts written for almost five months!

I guess I’m growing up (slowly, Oh Viktoria ♫ … *cough*) since all I seem to do is work, or go off to play after work. (Bats Day at Disneyland was fun! ^_^) My websites are sadly near-abandoned.

In fact, I just found out a little while ago about Twitter’s new API thingamabobber, and finally installed a new Twitter feed plugin. (Had to register a Twitter app for that. :x )

It now means that I don’t have an automatic backup of my tweets or favorites. Considering going manual, but I haven’t done it yet. Found a couple Twitter backup/archive plugins (Ozh’ and HL) but Ozh doesn’t work for me and HL creates its own archive which I don’t want to deal with.

Other news… I migrated my websites to a new host! No more sold-to-by-previous-host … host! Kind of sad to leave them (Fluid Hosting), they were really good, kept me informed of server news and other maintenance. They also let me know about the WordPress botnet attack! But I felt guilty using the old host’s package, as if I should have moved over to one of their package offerings, but I couldn’t afford $100 a year, not for hobby sites that don’t even get updated once a season! So I had to move. Messed up a few things in the move, lost a few files without realizing it, because my backup hard drive wasn’t up to date. Ugh.

I also managed to mess up my portfolio website’s WordPress install over the weekend when I installed the Limit Login Attempts plugin! Don’t know how that happened. The only two files I edited were the wp-config file and .htaccess, and somehow that made any WordPress-related pages show up as blank.

When I uploaded other config files to the site, those blogs would show up fine, so I thought it was the config file, but I compared it to a working config file and the only difference was the database name. Ended up deleting/reinstalling WordPress files and deleting/reuploading the database tables. That might not even have been the problem, but my blog came back up. Managed to get the LLA plugin installed on all my blogs.

So… yeah. I have to say, catching up on web development is not fun. I coded a page the other day for work and I struggled, constantly referencing the W3 wiki. Blah. Still don’t know the difference (in usage or implementation) between HTML and XHTML. Still haven’t learned HTML 5 (or even a lot of the eXtensibility of XHTML), just relying on general HTML knowledge.

Not doing much else beyond keeping up with social media sites and watching tv. Oh, I’m trying to pull together a Miwako Sakurada cosplay for Anime Expo in five weeks. Still need to figure out a few bits.

… Okay, maybe things haven’t changed that much. :)

backup Twitter on WordPress

I spent most of today working on a Twitter backup or archive on a WordPress installation. This was something I’d been considering since I learned people were making plugins to port their tweets to their blog. Thought I’d share my experience.

What I wanted: A simple backup of all my tweets from my account and all my favorited tweets of others.

What I kept finding: Integrate Twitter into WordPress! Widget! Cross-post! Update Twitter about new blog updates!

I was dazzled by wp-lifestream and briefly considered backing up all of my social networking accounts. That was until I saw over 500 files for the plugin queued up in my FTP program. I didn’t want a plugin that required almost as many files as the WordPress install itself! (Although someone says he’s working on cleaning up the plugin, wp-lifestream2, so I don’t know how it’ll end up.)

I wanted to try out Tweet Tweet but it requires registration at Twitter and acquiring OAuth? Too much hassle just for a simple archive. But I did really like the possibility of storing Twitter replies to me, and of archiving tables. (Not that I tweet that much, although my current 1500 WordPress entries seems a bit much for me.)

After I found these instructions how to import old Twitter favorites into WordPress, I finally decided on running the Twitter Importer plugin after using the Tweet Importer to import all of my old tweets (versus only the last 20 with Twitter Importer).

Two tips I could have used, instead of having to redo my original import:

One, set the default category to the type of tweet being imported, eg “My Tweets” versus “Favorite Tweets,” if you’d like the tweets separated into different categories.

Two, turn off allowing comments! No reason to leave myself open to spammenting on old tweets!

I’d consider this a good day’s work. Even though I didn’t get paid. (Not enough work at my job at the moment. Bah.)

all a-Twitter

I got a Twitter account. Yup. Found out about it through InsaneJournal. (Found IJ through GreatestJournal… GJ through Livejournal… LJ through message boards and friends… EZBoard through C… Don’t know why I’m recounting references all of a sudden…)

I got it mostly to stick on my blog so I won’t go without updating my blog in some fashion, but won’t deluge my blog with short, fairly pointless entries.

I’m disappointed that I can’t tweak it more than it is now though. (Well, if I took out the ul navigation from the sidebar I could. Or if I bloated my CSS with specific styling for each, which I hate.)

I don’t understand how Shari (sharii.com) got hers the way she did. How’d she get her updates inserted into p tags?? And how’d she insert those special characters?? And how’d she get the updates to show up regularly in code instead of using Javascript and a blank ul??

:( I don’t like my Twitter code.