One of the new features of iOS 8 is the new keyboard. Those of you reading my travel posts this last summer will have noticed the increased typos and ‘autocorrect’ errors that cropped up. I blamed it on the new phone.

But I have to say that so far this update is impressive on the keyboard front. I only had to go back and correct one error in the above.

🙂

[flexiblemap src=”http://wa01.navionicsmobile.com:8080/up/up//1401730734499Marker/newdoc.kml”]

This is the proposed route for our first day of our upcoming trip. Be sure to follow along at Sailing 2014. I am using it here to test Navionics’ shared KML files.

Navionics, KMZ and KML files

In the past I have used the tracking feature for the Navionics chartplotter app to track our sailing trips and, when I got home, uploaded the KMZ tracks to Google Maps My Maps and then cross-posted them back to the blog entries via an iframe. A) this is a lot of work and B)  it was necessarily done after the fact and not when most of the readership was actually reading the entries. So I set out to find a better solution for our upcoming trip.

Another interesting note is the new Google Custom Maps doesn’t support KMZ uploads and so you have to go back to the ‘Classic’ maps to do so. And who knows how long that will last. Sometimes ‘upgrades’ are really annoying.

Anyway I tried a whole bunch of plugins but the the two most likely (WP Google Maps  and XML Google Maps) were either for pay or not currently working with the latest versions of WordPress. I don’t mind paying for good functionality, but the $20 seemed a bit steep when I didn’t want to use 95% of the features I was paying for and there was no guarantee that it would do exactly what I wanted.

I finally came across WP Flexible Map and WP Flexible Map Options which allowed me to link to a KML file and have it displayed on my post with the desired parameters. The Options plugin just allows mw to set the parameters globally rather than having to include them in the shortcode. To call the KML file you simply include the shortcode [flexiblemap src=”http://source url”]

This however presented a few problems. First I had to upload the KML file to an accessible server. I tested it using a folder on macblaze.ca and it worked ok (with a few provisos—see point 2) but since I was not planning on having a laptop this meant I would have to figure out a way to ftp the files from an email attachment using my iPhone. It was starting to verge on too many steps with way too many issues.

Second, the Flexible Map didn’t see to work with KMZ files which is what Navionics produced; it apparently would only work with KML files. A quick google showed that KMZ were just KML files and their accompanying support files compressed using the standard zip format—an awful lot like epub files. I could therefore unzip the KMZ and then upload the KML and it worked really slick. Of course I would have to figure out how to do this on my iPad or iPhone and that wasn’t working out to well for me.

Eventually, as a result of posting the tracks on my Facebook account via Navionics built in share button, I realized that the app automatically posted a KML files to their server that it used to synch the tracks between the instances of the app (iPhone, iPad etc.) as well as display on Facebook. Furthermore this link was actually in the email I had been using to extract the KMZ file—it is just that it was a tinyurl and I had been ignoring it as promotions or a link to the website. So, a quick copy in paste from the (now unsent) email into the WP app and I have my map.

Cool.

Hopefully this means next trip (6 days and counting) that I will be able to post the map of the day’s travels along with the blog post with no delays necessary. I guess we will see.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
—Abraham Lincoln

If there was some philosophy I could say I truly believe in then this would be it. Likely a lot of it is that I am an inveterate tinkerer and like to take the opportunity to learn new things, but mostly I think I am a bit addicted to efficiency. A process that runs smoothy and without hiccups is one that makes me smile and if I can spend 3 hours doing something interesting and learning a new skill that will carve 4 hours off a mundane and boring task ,then the outcome is guaranteed to make me grin like an idiot.

Case in point: my boating quiz. As I had mentioned previously I felt the interface for the Slick Quiz plugin sucked, and was full of redundant entry and irrelevant info that had to be entered regardless of my opinion. Since I could build a customized entry system in Filemaker in a matter of moments, it just made sense to do it my way.

That left the issue of how to get my info from Filemaker to WordPress’s quiz plugin. A quick check revealed that Slick Quiz had made a couple of tables in the WordPress MySQL database. I exported the existing data to get a sample of the table structure and then went in to Filemaker and with (a lot of) trial and error managed to create an export file that I could dump via phpMyAdmin into the correct tables. Voila!

The Point

It took me several days of playing with variables, learning software and figuring out that special characters like ampersands and curly quotes were giving me grief, before I could get the system running. I probably could have done a whole lot of data entry the hard way in those few days, but…

• I learned new software and new systems
• I learned about the nature of ‘special’ characters in a text import/export situation
• I practiced and polished my Filemaker skills, making the next project that much easier (this is the process that had led to my ability to make a better interface in the first place)
• And last, but not least, I now have a customizable system that will allow quick and efficient entry of data form weeks and months, potentially saving me hundreds of hours over the long haul.

I’m not such a big Lincoln fan generally — I tend to feel politicians are generally less altruistic than history portrays them — but I am totally on board with this little quote. Spend some time sharpening your axe people; it is almost always the right choice.

I am going to try and add a quiz element to the blog. I thought I could do some studying/refreshing on boat related stuff and learn something computer at the same time. For now I will start with a plugin called SlickQuiz. I like Watu but the free version doesn’t give me randomization options and I am not forking out $75 bucks for what is essentially a one person project. The plan is to enter a whole bunch of questions from basic boat terminology to light and sound signals. I will then just break them into 10 question quick-quizzes and hopefully use them like digital flash cards to try and get some of the more esoteric stuff to stick. The entry interface to SlickQuiz sucks so I will start by building a database for question entry and then export the output to an xml file that I will import via phpmyadmin directly into the wp databases

Notes

• Must either delete the records first or change the id. XML import will not replace or update records; it will only add new.
• At this point  I can’t make the xml export work straight from Filemaker so I have to copy the output file manually and past it in Text Wrangler. From there I can use phpMyAdmin to import the xml file.

The Quiz page

 

 

I’ve posted a few things that tickled my fancy over the years and they have been in a lot of formats, .mov, .flv. .wmv, even some .swf’s. So given the rise of html 5 and a more unified mp4 system, I went back and converted most of them and have reposted them on two grouped pages:

Movies & Collected Funnies 1
and
Movies & Collected Funnies 2

Most were converted using Adobe Media Encoder CC, but for some reason the codecs for the ‘borrowed’ flvs wouldn’t allow any Adobe product to import them. So I turned to Handbrake, a lovely, lovely product; worked great.

I now also need to go and clean up the galleries as they all seem to (again) be using different formats and half of them don’t seem to work. Let me know if you find anything still broken.

I have been playing  with Gallery (Gallery 3 to be exact) software since I moved to the new host. I am not sure I will leave it installed but it’s interesting to play with. For now you can visit it here macblaze.ca/gallery.

At this point, I have a public album and a private one. If you want to see the private one you have to sign in:
User: test
Password: album

This mean I could set up private albums and control the permissions via viewing. There are also supposed to be shopping basket modules and ecommerce integrations which I will be playing with next. It will also automatically watermark the images for me.

One of the things I am supposed to be able to do is integrate images from the gallery into my WP posts. See the example below:

Smooth Gallery

Doesn’t work at all

[hgallery3 id=”4,6″ render=”smoothgallery”]

Jcarousel

[hgallery3 id=”3″ render=”jcarousel”]

Seems to skip all over the place

Dir Table

I can make this work.

[hgallery3 id=”14,16″ render=”dir_table”]

Single Image

Why?

[hgallery3 id=”14″ render=”single_img”]

Dir

Again, why?

[hgallery3 id=”4,14,16″ render=”dir”]

Ok. As of noon, I seem to be on the new host (Stablehost.com) and everything seems to running as well as can be expected.

I don’t have my actual files uploaded yet as the ftp and webdisk seem to be super slow at uploads. I will work on it. All this means is for now there are no images that I haven’t uploaded by hand.

Let me know if things seem speedier to you’all… Or not.

Process

• I downloaded (via ftp) the entire contents of my wp-content folder to my desktop from GoDaddy’s server.
• I exported the mysql database via phpMyadmin, also to my desktop.
•  I did a clean install of WordPress on Stablehost.
• I attempted to import the mysql backup on Stablehost via phpmyadmin but it kept kicking up xxx table already exists errors. eventually I deleted all the tables from the new database and tried again. THis time it imported the tables and data with no problem.
• I headed over to GoDaddy and  pointed the macblaze.ca domain to Stablehost’s nameservers and about 20 –30 minutes later the redirect took affect and I was now going tot eh new server.

The issue at this point was that while I was being directed to the new server (tested by uploading a new index.html page), it wasn’t picking up the default wordpress pages and nothing was being displayed. I screwed around for about 2 hours and then suddenly it started working. I am not sure if I fixed it or there was just some cache that needed to be flushed or what.

• To get it up and running I uploaded my theme to the host and then we were cooking with bacon.
• Next up, I need to figure out how to get nearly 1 gig of old files uploaded  because the 40 meg I have tried so far has taken almost 2 hours. (Turns out you need to use the file manager in cpanel. Bulk upload zipped files and extract them once they are uploaded. Speedy-speedy.)
• I also need to  redirect my macblaze.ca email and we should be good to go. (Done like dinner)

If you’ve searched through the back entries in this blog, you will know it started out as an attempt to learn a bit more about blogging software and hosting a blog. I had originally set up a  Blogger site called moreblaze.blogspot.ca— which Leslie still uses. Blaze was an initialism of Bruce, Leslie And Zak’s Electronic blog and became a staple in my online nomenclature. My first entry was at 4:21 on November 29th, 2002. I (we) continued dabbling on Blogspot until September 2005, when I decided I had enough.

The idea of some external agency hosting — and controlling — my personal files and intellectual property bugged me (and still does); there is too much about online copyright that is fuzzy to make that situation overly comfortable. I would much rather be in control of the servers and the actual files than to trust some unknown agency to back them up and keep them private. There was also the issue of compatibility; I had already lost years of diary entries when I lost my old Apple IIc. I still have the floppies, but no way to access them. Was I going to trust some IT company to still be there year after year?

And this was before Google bought Blogger and there was a lot of less investment in the finer details. When it comes to software, I am a bit of a control freak and I didn’t exactly like the way Blogspot managed the interface or my ability to modify the blog itself: I’m just not much of a standard template guy.

Anyway in August 2005, I started toying with the idea of hosting my own blog. I had an old Ruby iMac with a copy of OS X Server 10.3 that I used as a testing server and it seemed natural to start using it to host my own stuff. After some research I settled on Blojsom, a java based blog platform that used flat text files as a storage method: that seemed safe enough. It also seemed pretty easy and foolproof. On September 1, 2005 I posted my first entry; ironically about the difficulties I was having getting Blojsom to work properly.

Note: the more curious of you will remark that there are in fact entries older than Sept 1, 2005. When I got around to adding a bunch of old poetry, I decided to back date the entries to the date that I originally wrote them.

Around about the same time I had been playing around with MySQL, an open source relational database. It’s not something I have ever gotten extremely comfortable with, but at least I know the basics, or at least, enough to f*ck it up when I get too cocky. (An occurrence that Anthony, my old Hole’s IT contractor, would say was all too often.) Along about the end of September I had been getting frustrated with Blojsom and tried out WordPress for the first time. My main issue with it was that it seemed to limit me to one blog per installation and that wasn’t going to work for what I had in mind. Still WordPress was based on a MySQL back end and I was getting to be an expert at that wasn’t I? But then I would lose my safe flat files wouldnt’t I?

Almost exactly a month later I finally gave up on Blojsom, installed WordPress on the Ruby iMac, retrieved the blog entries from the old Blojsom blog and moved on. I had solved the multiple blog issue (thanks, Google) and managed to set up a nice blog for Zak to play with. Which he did for about as long as a teenager does anything, then promptly ignored it. WordPress at this point was in version 1.5 or 1.6. Version 2.0 with an awesome backend UI came out in December of that year, and I have never regretted moving.

And so November 12, 2005 found my first entry under the category of Random Picture of the Day and the start of more and more non-computer related blog posts.

But I digress… The next big event was the big Ruby crash of ’05. The Ruby bit the big one, and I was faced with trying to retrieve all my files and data. I got a new iMac (flatscreen) and retrieved the (thankfully) healthy harddrive from Ruby, installed a fresh installation of WordPress and was up and running again pretty damn quickly. But was at a bit of a loss on how to retrieve the blog entries, as they all resided in a MySQL database on an external drive. MySQL, as you may or may not know, has (or had at that point) no UI and it was all controlled by terminal commands that were at least 50% gobbledy-gook to me. Suffice it to say that in the end, with my old pal Google, I figured it out and we were cooking with gas once more.

Somewhere around this point I looked into domain names. After all, no one was going to visit my blog if they had to type in http://24.68.54.xxx to go to my blog. I settled on a free service called NoIP. I had to renew my membership by following a link every couple of months, but other than that it was free. Basically I entered the (semi) static IP (the weird number above) of my cable modem at home on their website and reserved macblaze.hopto.org as my personal domain. I then set up a route on my firewall at home directing traffic to port 80 (the www port) to be directed to my iMac. So now all calls for that domain name were then forwarded to my home computer’s WordPress installation and they got my blog. Cool!

Somewhere in there I also designed/modified my own theme (I did mention the control issues, didn’t I?). After I got it the way I liked it it remained relatively stable until a couple of months ago when I finally designed a theme from the ground up and made it more flexible. Look for more changes in the future.

I continued on merrily for a bunch of years after that. The only significant changes were a new mac mini for my personal use in March of 2009 (the old iMac became solely a blog server), the introduction of mobile blogging and the rise of blogging apps. When the iMac blew up in November of 2009 I had to do the whole song and dance of moving the MYSQL databases again, this time to the Mini, but it all worked out fine.

In January 2010, two things happened. I finally got my own domain (the current macblaze.ca) and I finally moved my WordPress installation to external hosting at GoDaddy. The domain was about $12/year and the hosting worked out to $60 a year or so. The main impetus for this was I was going to set up a site for my brother (beakerwood.ca), and if I was going to do for him, why not move mine as well. It all could be loaded on the same installation so I wasn’t paying any extra and hopefully would see some speed gains from their professional servers.

A word on privacy and control. While I am now using an external host and theoretically this does give GoDaddy access to my files, it is not the same thing as using a blog service and trusting them with your backend. The TOS (Terms of Service) are entirely different and my database is controlled by my passwords, not theirs. A quibble that is meaningless in this age of hackers and computer nerds but still, I don’t like the idea of anyone else controlling my intellectual property. I make regular back ups of the DB and the content on my own machines and am pretty disaster-proof.

At this time I also got access to GoDaddy’s email service so I could set up my own info (@) macblaze.ca email address for fun. (Incidentally this brought me up to 10 email addresses, only 4 of which I actively use). It lacked IMAP, which was annoying as I was pretty connected by this time (iPhone, iPad, 3 computers) and having to check the same mail on all my devices was annoying, so I didn’t use it for much; still don’t.

That’s pretty much it. I am learning more CSS and a bit of php to try and modify the blog as it suits me, but WordPress’s healthy development community generally supplies me with all the plugins I could want. Last year I started to make more of an an effort to post everyday and as of today the blog has been running for 8 years and 4 months with 1,192 posts.

So why all this long-winded and overly verbose history of my blog? Well I am getting pissed with GoDaddy. It’s slow, it keeps timing out, and frankly it’s time to break something again. So this month I am going to move to a new host. I have my eye on an account at StableHost. It’s only 4 bucks (maybe 6 if I upgrade) a month and gives me my IMAP email and is pretty highly regarded on the forums and such.

So…. there might be a wee interruption at some point. I have no idea how long the process of moving everything will take. Redirecting the domain can cause an up to 24-hour gap (although I’ve seen it happen in less than an hour) and moving the data and files might take a bit longer.

At some point I might continue my thoughts about blogs and intellectual property. I have a lot of them and they are mostly confused and illogical so you might enjoy the experience. 😉