Month: January 2007

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Weird support mail

None of the official mentions of getting support for Bugzilla say to mail me. They all point at newsgroups or mailing lists. But every so often, someone decides to mail me directly anyway, probably because they found my email address on the header of a source file or something listed as a contributor, or off the project history page or something. Sometimes I try to help, most of the time I just refer them back to the support page on the website. Anyhow, the ones I do get are often quite strange. Take this one for example:

Dear Sir,

I need free bugzilla books, i want to know about bugzilla,.

Send it through mail or particullar site address.

waiting for your reply

(name omitted)

So I sent this courteous (I thought) reply:

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/ is your best bet if you want free. It’s
viewable online or you can download and print the PDF.

All done, right? Not so, I got this back from him:

Dear Sir,

Thank you, I found it.

It’s contain lot of topics.. I am going to learn this. I am very
interesting to learn this.

Can you please send me the way of studing, that means, what should i
do, what should not i do,

Beacause when i install it, i have faced lot of problems, which is made by me..

Beacause i confused to do..

So, Can you please send me the Crisp Notation of Bugzilla, It should
be Short & Sweet.

Thanking You

With Warm Regards

(name omitted)

I don’t know about you, but to me this is an incredibly vague request. That’s like saying “please tell me everything there is to know about the world in 20 words or less.”

I replied pointing him at the support page on the website, and suggesting he ask more-specific questions when he gets there.

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Geeklog to WordPress converter

I’ve been intending to convert my blog from Geeklog to WordPress for probably the better part of a year.  I’m a stickler for preventing dataloss though, and I really wanted to keep all my old blog posts.  I searched the web on and off for a month or two looking for a way to convert the data, and the best I could find was the RSS import in WordPress.  Unfortunately, the RSS export in Geeklog sucks rocks, and even hacking on it a bit, I couldn’t get all the data out in one piece.

So I finally gave up searching and wrote my own WordPress import module for Geeklog that would copy and translate the data directly from one database to the other. It’s heavily based on the existing importer for TextPattern that’s included with the current WordPress distributions.  It imports categories, users, posts, and comments.  It also stores the Geeklog Story ID (sid) into the post metadata, for use in making the old permalinks keep working.  I have an article.php stub you can drop into your wordpress directory that takes the Geeklog permalinks and redirects to the new WordPress ones.

I’m posting this here so the next person who has to convert a Geeklog to a WordPress can save themselves a bunch of trouble. :)  It’s all been posted to WordPress’ Trac system.  If you make use of it and make any improvements to it while you’re at it, feel free to add them to that bug.

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Hello WordPress!

So I finally managed to get my blog converted to WordPress. 🙂

It’s much easier to post here than it was to Geeklog (what I was using before), which means I should be posting more frequently now. I have it set up so the feed URLs and the permalinks from the old blog should redirect to the new permalinks, so hopefully nothing was lost.

I may screw with the theme a bit before it settles down, so if you’re reading this in a web browser, don’t be surprised if the look changes when you come back 🙂