Java Thinking

I'm slowly working through my broken pages - which were broken during the conversion from WordPress to Blogger. I can see in Google Web Master tools I've still got 22 server 500 errors left. There must have been more like 50 to start with. Its a slow painful process of copying the content from the broken post to a new post. I suspect it may be caused by the original WordPress post having comments - something the Wordpress2Blogger script must not be able to handle and therefore creates an corrupted post. Interestingly, the contents of the post are still viewable via the monthly archive page, but viewing the individual post errors - presumably as it tries to render the comments. If I had time, I'd go look at my WordPress database to confirm this theory but all of my time is being taken with fixing the errors. I cannot recommend using the Wordpress2Blogger script, I'm feeling a lot of pain and I had no help from Blogger support or groups.

Its been a good week. I got my Virgin Mobile Broadband Prepaid 3G modem working, and learnt a lot in the process, and actually contributed to the GNOME project: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731 As part of this, I installed Pidgin so I could join the IRC channel and talk to developers, but I haven't yet figured out how to view the history for a channel - so I can see what happened while I was offline... It does surprise me though, that the database for mobile broadband providers is specific to the window manager (GNOME) instead of being a system level thing. I'm sure there are good reasons, and it probably doesn't matter, but what do the KDE (and others) users do? Define it all over again? Worse than that though is that Virgin don't seem to make the APN easily available. I found it by searching the web, and finding it in forums, but why isn't it in the FAQ on a Virgin site? I didn't anticipate how much I'd enjoy having access to the internet...

I've been wondering for a while why people spam blogs with comments like: Your site is so cool, thanks it really helped me! Or any of the many variations. Its usually obvious for several reasons (spelling and just completely out of context) that this is spam. But why bother? It turns out that some blogging software is set up so that if a user has commented, and the administrator has approved that comment, then subsequent comments from that user will be published automatically (without requiring admin approval). That means, once approved, that user is trusted and can comment freely. So, if you accidentally approve this spam bait (innocently believing it to be a genuine complement) expect much more less innocent comments to appear. In Wordpress, this setting can be found in 'Discussion settings' under 'Comment author must have a previously approved comment'.

I just came across a problem using wordpress that stopped everything working - any request to the Wordpress site resulted in a blank page. In the log file for the host, I could see: PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 14592 bytes) in <path to a plugin php file> Removing the plugin specified just meant that the error was reported for the next plugin. Searching Google showed many discussions about this problem. Luckily the solution for me was easy enough - as described in this topic : In <wordpress root>/wp-includes/cache.php I just added: ini_set("memory_limit","12M");