I’ve been remiss with regular posts due to even more changes at work — much were disappointing, too… the need to rest more these days, and other serious things that make me not want to blog, but there they are. Made me realize I still prefer writing thoughts down, after all. Will try to post earlier written entries.
Okay, so I mentioned I don’t like keeping multiple blogs. However, this blog is so chunky and twisty and texty. Entries mostly don’t have a point. I’d like to keep it that way.
That blog is full of pictures. Wala lang, I’ve gone visual… and the entries are short. I suppose DSTS prefers this blog. Also maximizing my 3 gigabytes.
OK, so I made a move again. I hope it’s for the last time.
I’ve mentioned I started with fooling around with a free blog offered by the Friendster networking service. It seemed like a good idea; it was as beta as I was, and it was connected to people I know from which I found a handful of readers willing to put up with my junk to this day. 
It was an outlet to write about people, things, and events I encounter as I work and travel between Shenzhen and Manila. At the time, the Friendster blogs were provided by Typepad — service was poor to middling. Not so attractive templates. On the side, I’ve been checking out Blogger, which was already popular and became integrated with Google in which I have accounts, and I noted Google dropped its Pages in favor of Blogger. Then about last year, Friendster made the switch to WordPress services, and I admit the templates with customizable widgets and headers made stuff much more fun. Themes are much more attractive than Blogger’s (although Blogger does have its advantages as well). However, with the switch, my blog became inaccessible to me as WordPress turned out to be one of the service providers that were blocked by the Great Firewall of China. As a contingency I blogged with Blogger for a few months. I’d like to say not all publishing sessions were a success — sometimes I really get blocked and need to save and publish another day. Perhaps it was the service package we got that was not so good. But at least with Blogger, some publishing happened.
During this time I’ve been trying to figure out a way to combine my old blog with my new blog. There are Import and Export Blog tools in Blogger. I downloaded the XML code of my old blog. But it seems Blogger is still working with its Import capability because after a few tries, nothing uploaded. I checked forums, and what advice I got from those regarding posts from other services, such as logging onto drafts.blogger.com and making a temp account, seem to no longer apply. My Blogger admin page indicated the Import tool works with Blogger export files, and no mention of export files from other services.
I came home for the holidays and for some things related to work. I log into Blogger again and had another go… no good. What happens is, when you hit the Import button, the panel will seem to process this, but after a few minutes you will be prompted, “Could not import file.” or something like that. Then I thought, what if I check out the non-Friendster WordPress service? I created a WordPress account, found the Import Tool, and held my breath as I pressed ‘upload’. No hassle, worked as it should, and all my posts since 2005 in the old Friendster blog found a new home. Giddy from the development, I exported my Blogger posts and attempted upload. Except for a few formatting incompatibility (some paragraphs lost spacing), there was no delay or problem.
So now I will mainly blog with WordPress. Here’s my Pros/Cons list for the free service:
Pros:
Cons:
In case I need to go back to China, I will probably just have to store my entries in my computer using Journler when things come up, then upload them to WordPress later.
If you’re making a new blog from scratch and don’t need to import things anyway, Blogger could be for you. I did say Blogger had its advantages. Here’s Blogger’s Pros/Cons for the free service:
Pros:
Cons:
You may want to check for other comparisons dealing with hardcore coding, posting from your mobile cell phones, paid blog services, or blogging with paid hosting or domain names, all of which I am not familiar with.
Will now be diving into a muck of tags and categories from two different blogs and see about putting them in order.
UPDATE (23 January 2009): Finished checking; there were two or three posts that didn’t get imported, even as I’ve repeated the process twice more. So the WordPress Import tool isn’t perfect, as of this writing. Had to upload the three entries manually, and as a consequence, I lost BCS’s comment in this post.
I have a Friendster blog. I have a Friendster blog because Friendster is so much more popular than MySpace and Multiply and Facebook in Southeast Asia and most of my friends live there, and have Friendster accounts. In Mutiply and MySpace, I have, like, only three, four friends… and Facebook is a place to gain superpowers and raise fluffy pets and post all those crazy test results.
While I tend to hate really, really big parties (informal dinner scenes in any Hugh Grant movie is more my bag), I like that, from time to time, my friends can see I’m still alive and that yes, the company that employs me is still struggling (it’s remarkably been an ongoing saga, likely to rival Days Of Our Lives in run). And so I had Friendster, and by extension, a Friendster blog site.
However, the Friendster blog hasn’t been consistent. First it excluded Southeast Asia during its trial runs… sometimes we could get the blogs, but they had lots of bugs. When Friendster blog services finally reached the other side of the world, they gave me six templates and three of them were ugly. Then it switched services from Typepad to WordPress and, benchmarking from the ugly templates, beta testing was peachy. However, blogging from Shenzhen, access is once again barred. I don’t know if it’s because of the beta thing or China put up the super firewall again following the slow transition from Olympics mania to mainland normalcy, which puts a crimp in things either way.
Will be blogging with Blogger again, standard clinical templates that I’m not too fond of and, as of this typing, non-working beta XML input fields notwithstanding. I’m getting these bx-error codes every time I attempt to upload XML templates. Blog experts advise that enough people should report these errors so that Blogger would deign look into the problems… so it’s really swell that the error prompt page tells you to report the problem but does not have a handy link in place, the better to have you jump through hoops in the form of a bunch of sincerely encouraging mucky help groups and pages, before the service finally lets you find the link that takes you to the part where you input your problem’s details. For the love of Gygax, report your bx errors!
WordPress has prettier templates, but unfortunately for me the control panel refuses to show itself through the stupid national firewall.
I will be without the usual Friendster people but I guess it’s OK, since I only have about a handful of friendship people who dared suffer through the first few entries. A chunk of them dropped out, some persist checking it out every now and then either because I’m family or they love me, or they’re just nosy people from work trying to glean a clue… but yes, I am glad it is still somewhat comprehensible to an elite few *kaff, kaff*.
But yes… I am Friendless. Will Blogger withstand the mighty proletarian firewall? Hum.
UPDATE: Moved back to WordPress on the 16 January 2009 — importing posts from old blogs with it is currently better than Blogger. Wondering about storage space, however.
It may be coincidence, but about three years ago I ranted about the then-non-blogging state of countries that are not the US and Canada in the realm of Friendster and something called Pusit Classifieds. That was settled soon enough after the post was published, however clueless Dave was.
And then I had my Beijing Olympics opening ceremony freakout — just scroll down to the posts below this one. Not my finest moment.
I was not expecting anything except maybe government plainclothesmen masquerading as our mineral water delivery boys suddenly flashing their badges as I cluelessly let them in and they take me away to be deported forever and a day for blogging something so heinous; Little Spud had been imagined to cry piteously from the crib as he sees his poor Mama and her laptop getting their asses kicked. Again it might be coincidence. I opened my Inbox yesterday and found an e-mail from the Friendster Blogs team. Cool revamps, the e-mail promised, and would I be interested in checking out the new stuff? If so, reply to the e-mail. Yes, please. Sent the reply. Auto reply comes back that the team will respond within 72 hours for new instructions.
I received the new instructions today, and the big change was Friendster switched to WordPress blog services. The instuctions mention that pictures will probably take a couple of days to get transferred to the new digs so I’ll probably check out uploading images later. Fiddling with controls, I see that the WordPress Friendster Blogs’ more obvious advantages are:
Advantages of the Typepad version over WordPress:
Because of probably a prior agreement with WordPress, like Typepad before it, the Friendster templates are fewer and less tricked out here than the template selections as you’d see them if you’d go directly to WordPress and start a blog there yourself. Also, more templates there have the custom image header option. Friendster gives you the standard limited storage, and creative license with the template is off limits unless you pay fees, but it’s a good enough improvement for what Daddy Of Magnus fondly calls yung sa friendships. Hey, three years of the same six Typepad templates – and three of them uglier than anything I have ever seen – anything is better.
Friendster ends its list of instructions with: “Once you migrate you can never go back.” The only time going back became entertaining was when Marty McFly messed up the date as he dared drive something with a flux capacitor in it. I think this warning means you better back up things like your photo album files, if the only copies you have are those in the Typepad blog. And so, the verdict for this year’s makeover is: still limited but peachy keen golly gee whiz.
