You can still switch to Blogger FTP publishing (for now)

This blog post might be of use to you if you, like me, you are migrating your Blogger blog to WordPress. As you may have read I am having to move my blog because Blogger is removing it's publish by FTP feature.

When you first try and migrate your posts it will fail. After a bit of head scratching I realised that this was because the WordPress "import" migration relies on the blog being hosted on a "blogspot.com" address and not on a custom domain. You can easily change this temporarily without affecting your current blog. Just clock the appropriate option under "Publishing" from the blog's "Settings" tab.

If you then want to edit your old template to redirect the old URLs to the new ones, or are just testing the migration process, you will need to switch back to FTP. This would not be a problem if Blogger had not removed the FTP option already, but they have, so it is. Fortunately the feature is still active and it is just the link that has been removed.

So, to switch back now you need to look at the address of the page when you are creating a post or editing blogger settings. Make a note of the "blogID" from the line. Then paste the following in the address bar replacing XXXXXXXX with the blogID value.

http://www.blogger.com/blog-publishing.g?blogID=XXXXXXXX&publishMode=PUBLISH_MODE_FTP

You can then check all the details, enter the captcha, and save the setting to get back to where you were before. I hope this is of help.

March 2010 Events

People ask me to let them know when something is happening that they might be interested in and I try and do that, but this month there are so many events I thought I would also summarise them here...

• March 4th is another Dorkbot Newcastle in the Life Lab at the Centre for Life. This month Sam Goldwater talks about animation techniques, David King talks about his KISS ethos (Keep It Simple, Stupid), and Brian Degger talks about the curve from scientist to new media.


• March 12th is Datarama. This month is an AV and Science festivals special at the Start and Shadow. This is a show and tell with a artistically creative slant. You never quite know what you will see and it is worth a visit.


• March 13th and 14th is the second Maker Faire at the Centre for Life. This is a chance for the UK's mad inventors (including me) have a chance to show off there creations.


• March 17th NE Bytes is back at Newcastle University. This month features Visual Studio 2010 with Richard Fennell and Matt McSpirit from Microsoft talks about System Centre in the R2 Wave.


• March 20th and 21st is BarCampNorthEast3 at the Centre for Life. This is a chance to share your experiences and skills with others and you are coming. Attendance is mandatory but I promise you that you will enjoy it. :-)


• March 29th is Super Mondays. This month is all about mobile payments featuring John Lunn from PayPal.

Finally March 10th and 24th is the fortnightly Newcastle Coffee Morning from 8:30am at the The Settle Down Café. Just a chance to have a cupper and a chat before work.

That is it for now. I recommend all these events. There are more details on the events web sites but feel free to ask me if you want any more details.

Why am I not photographing the Apple Newcastle launch?

The answer is simple. They will not let me.

As you know I like to take photographs. Some are what you might call "Artistic" and others are more of a documentation of history. Personally I love looking at old images form when I was younger, or of places before I knew them in the past. Because of this I take pictures of the here and now for people to look back on in the future.

As the an Apple store opening is something that draws the crowds I thought this was something I should look at capturing on (virtual) film. Before I did this I emailed Apple and asked if there was a problem with me doing this out of politeness.

Sadly Apple responded stating that they have a policy of no photography in the stores and would not be able to mane an exception for the launch. They did say that if I queued up and only took a couple of pictures then there "shouldn't be a problem". Not overly happy with being told that I am not allowed to take a picture, but almost saying that I could get away with taking a couple, I pushed for a definitive Yes or No. I was not surprised to get back a polite No.

In the end I decided not bother going down to capture the day and I suspect there will be plenty of pictures taken by camera phones. Most of the phones were probably iPhones so the image quality will be low and the pictures out of focus, but at least we have some records of the day. :-P

So, I have had my rant, and Apple have dropped a long way in my estimation of customer relations. In the interests of neutrality I feel it important to point out I did not ask for permission to photograph inside the Sony Shop, but Ikea have said yes (and that is bizarrely true).

What domain should I use?

I have now decided to move my blog to WordPress following Blogger discontinuing there FTP service. Thank you for the words of advice.

I have another decision to make now and your input would be appreciated. The question is... Should I move this main "tech, rant, fun" blog to another domain.

A while ago I registered "alistairmacdonald.org" and "macdonald.info". My intention was to use these as my professional front-end and keep my "agm.me.uk" for more personal projects. Last year I managed to register "alistairmacdonald.com" that I was planning to use instead of the ".org". I also have a few ".co.uk" domains that I never used in the end including "Millisecond", "Multitrack", and "Stereophonic".

I know a few people don't like my "agm.me.uk" address. The reason why I like it is that it is short, AGM (my initials) are memorable, and it is controlled by Nominet so subject to UK and not oversees law. The down side is that the domain does not instantly identify it's self as mine, the ".me.uk" is often sometimes with ".co.uk", and more recently people have been missing off the ".uk" with the addition of the ".me" top level domain.

No matter what happens I anticipate still using "agm.me.uk" for my pet projects and micro sites. I am also actively moving some pet projects to the domain in a cost saving exercise.

So, what are your thoughts?

My blog will be moving

My blog here is managed by Google's Blogger and hosted on my own web site on a Rails Playground server. This is done by giving Blogger FTP access to my site that is used to upload the pages when they change. Sadly Google are deprecating this FTP feature and I will either have to run the blog from the Blogger's servers (but I can use my own domain name) or host the my blog myself.

I have always had a plan in place to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress. This will continue to be hosted on my web site and the URLs will not change. You never know when a service will disappear so I tend to plan ahead like this. There is a nice migration path and this is currently my favoured solution.

My main concern about moving to WordPress is the amount of comment spam that friends get despite using recaptcha. I have had to disable the comments on the BarCampNorthEast web site that was receiving a couple of spam comments a day.

So, do you think I am doing the right thing. Should I use WordPress or something else? Should I use another comment service like Disqus to cut down on spam, or should I host the whole thing somewhere else? All comments welcome (unless they are spam :-) ).

USB printing on Ubuntu 9.10

Last year a purchased an Aspire Revo R3600 with a 160GB HDD that I installed Ubuntu on. It has been a great little machine and I am very pleased with it.

Somewhere down the line my old LaserJet printer (from Freegle/Freecycle) that is connected using a cheep USB to Parallel adapter (off ebay) stopped working. It is a problem that many people appear to have had when they upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). After a bit (okay, a lot) of debugging I have figured out that you need to treat the USB device as a parallel printer and not the default USB printer. To do this change the URL prefix from "usb:" to "parallel:", or if that is nonsense to you use the following instructions.

• Go to the printing devices by selecting "System", "Administration", and then "Printing".


• Right click on the old printer (if one is there) and select delete.


• Click the "New" button.


• Select "Other" and enter the device URI as"parallel:/dev/usblp0".


• Select your printer as you would normally and it should then work (a reboot may be required).

Remember this is only for if you are using a parallel printer with a USB converter. I hope this helps you, and if it does and you have posted for help elsewhere, please help someone else by going back and posting the answer (or link back to here). Finally, before you smug Windows users start having a go, it took me longer to get the converter running on my XP machine. :-P

If things were a little different

Today I was looking through some fonts for a project and came across some familiar ones. Just for a giggle I wondered what they would look like if things had worked out a little different.