Category Archives: Websites - Page 2

Migrating from b2evolution to WordPress

Posted by on January 6, 2012 No comments

Once you are stuck on b2evolution, it becomes a daunting task to move your content to another blogging engine. I have always envied the WordPress bloggers and the WordPress eco-system of plugins, but never made the transition due to the painstaking task of moving content.

WordPress does not provide a proper importer, but there are a few options mentioned on the WordPress Wiki. After my basic installation of WordPress, I copied the legacy PHP importer into the admin folder and ran the PHP script which then proceeded to import content into the WordPress DB.

The import works taking the content along, but fails to accurately import the correct Permalinks – in my case the published date was wrong in about 80% of cases, which results in many 404′s. Instead of manually changing the publish date, get the 404 Redirected plugin which will solve all your issues. Even with the 404 Redirected plugin, you will need to manage the 404′s by reassigning tags and categories, but this is substantially easier with the plugin then having to edit your .htaccess-file.

Another big issue is that the existing importers do not import your media into the WordPress gallery and adjust the URLs in the posts. Since most of my images had been crawled and manually updating posts would have been too cumbersome, I decided to just copy the “media”-folder from b2evolution into my WordPress directory.

Once you copied the media-folder, use the standalone smush.it Java application (you need a version of Java installed on your hosting account) to re-optimize images in the media-folder and then also install the smush.it plugin which will optimize future image uploads.

Over the next few days I will post additional information about the WordPress plugins I installed which will make your blog rock!



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WordPress plugin – 404 Redirected

Posted by on January 5, 2012 4 comments

Anyone migrating from b2evolution or any other blogging software which does not fully support importing into WordPress will feel a world of pain to get the original blog’s content right. If you don’t pay attention, you will receive many 404′s as the generic importers (or even the old b2evolution importer) will import with wrong permalinks (i.e. in my case 80% of my posts had the wrong date-slug).

While Google Webmaster toolkit came to the rescue in restoring the correct slugs and forced me to manually updating posts and Permalinks, in hindsight this was completely unnecessary, as 404 Redirected would have done most of the work for me.

The plugin provides “Automatic Redirects” which will match the inbound Permalink to the existing articles through a 301 redirect and fixes almost all issues.

The biggest problem I encountered after the import was that the tag-format changes in WordPress (b2evolution uses “/ps3:” whereas WordPress uses “/tag/ps3″) which results in many errors.

The 404 Redirected plugin captures all 404′s and you can view them via the “Captured 404 URLs” tab. The awesome feature is, that any 404 URL can then be manually mapped to a post, a tag or a category:

Wordpress Plugin 404 redirected - manual redirects

Within a few days I managed to resolve most of the 404 errors and every once in a while some additional 404′s for tags and categories require re-mapping which is a really painless exercise nowadays.

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Google Analytics supports ZAR as a currency

Posted by on December 31, 2011 No comments

It has been a long wait, and finally (and quietly) Google has introduced the South African Rand as a supported currency:

Google Analytics is now supporting South African Rand

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bidorbuy introduces Internet Explorer 8 enhancements

Posted by on May 1, 2010 No comments

About two thirds of our customers use Internet Explorer 8 and we just introduced our search accelerators which are now available in the Internet Explorer Gallery. Making our website available for search from within the browser enables our users to
access bidorbuy whenever they need a service from it, without having to type the full web address. Additionally, we are always with our users, right in their browser.

The Visual Search is a new search capability we introduced especially for Internet Explorer 8 which allows users to search for items on bidorbuy straight from their search bar without having to leave the page they are on. Click on a suggestion at any time to immediately execute the search without having to type the entire word or phrase.

Our visual suggestions will instantly show you a preview of the results directly in the Search Box drop-down. Where relevant we will display Featured items, Auctions closing soon and Articles & Reviews.

How many steps does it take with your current browser to find a product? Until now it was likely a series of cutting and pasting information from one webpage to another.

Now there’s a better way with the bidorbuy Accelerator which helps you in performing your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to display instantly and visually items featured on bidorbuy.

The above pictures do not do justice to how cool our features work and trying them out will hopefully wow you. Installing those enhancements is really simple by visiting Internet Explorer Gallery — and while you are there, please spend 1 minute to register on the Internet Explorer Gallery site and vote for our enhancements.

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MTN: The death of the internet

Posted by on April 12, 2010 1 comment

At bidorbuy we pay special attention to performance, as a slow website will irritate our users and will in the end result in lost sales. Over the last few months we have pretty much emptied our bag of tricks and tweaked on many different places and the development team did some amazing work in performance tuning.

The Yellow company still amazes me – not just because they decided again to remove my international roaming option, but also looking at their website. Truly shocking how a company of such size can run a site like this.

A special lesson for the MTN-IT division:

  • Your main page loads 530 KB of plain Javascript (thats 12 JS files). Add to this another 172 KB of stylesheets.
  • While the sheer amount of JS and CSS speaks books about bad site-development, at least an easy fix would be to gzip the JS and CSS
  • Most browsers will block rendering due to JavaScript being in the header – so move it to the end of the body
  • Minify and combine those shocking JS and CSS
  • Your ETags are configured wrong and truly do not serve any purpose – in fact if your server environment is clustered, none of those images will ever be cached properly
  • Fix your 404′s/410′s (such as /images/headerBG.gif)
  • Specify image width/height on your images
  • 41 % (or 74KB of your 180KB) of your CSS is not even used on /Pages/MTN.aspx
  • You have two redirect chains, each taking 400ms
  • You could save up to 30% on your images if you had optimized them properly
  • Never include CSS after a JS, as this will block the parallel download of CSS
  • Don’t include the same CSS twice (i.e. # ../HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css and HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css?rev=wLUP2n6…)

The above are the basics in web-performance management, but again it could be worse, as of writing the meerkat-competition is unreachable.

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jQuery revolution @ bidorbuy

Posted by on April 2, 2010 No comments

Over at bidorbuy.co.za we are really introducing a number of firsts in the online auction market. We obviously want to create a user-experience for our buyers and sellers to enjoy their time on our site as well as improve productivity.

Over the next few weeks we will introduce many new features to improve usability. A few weeks back we implemented a jQuery-based search-recommendation which provides users with guided searches and search-recommendations – although noticeable, the new feature is not intrusive.

Another cool feature (it is surprising that we never had this in the past) is to introduce an image-gallery for sellers which will really improve how they can list items. The current image system is truly cumbersome and users are not even able to view images they previously uploaded. The new gallery truly rocks:

Based on jQuery with lazy loading of pages, image transitions, keyboard support, sorting and filtering. The gallery will seamlessly integrate into the seller-tools as well as the current listing functionality. We will also introduce a number of really cool UX features over the next few weeks which will make your auction experience a truly awesome journey :D

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The 2009 SA Blog awards

Posted by on March 3, 2009 No comments

It’s the 5th annual 2009 South African Blog Awards, and the first time I am participating. So click on the link below (or on the sidebar) and nominate your favorite blogs:

If you have your own blog, get your nomination badge from the website – but please help out with the SA Blog Awards (by nominating me and others).

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Shrine Clowns

Posted by on March 2, 2009 No comments

In a previous Friday Picture I posted a picture of a clown funeral. While I thought this was an staged event, I only found out today, that this was actual footage of a burial. I have subsequently removed the offending picture and apologise to the McQuarrie-family for the insensitive nature of this post.

The picture depicted Duncan Alexander McQuarrie, a member of the Clowns at the Oleika Shrine who passed away at age 64 in 2004.

It was never the intention to mock McQuarrie or his family. As you know, the Friday Picture is typically controversial to raise awareness and sometimes even depict questionable content to make people think of current issues.

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My LifeStream

Posted by on December 24, 2008 No comments

To improve my social life (I hope) I have just created my LifeStream. A LifeStream is a life-streaming content aggregation, which creates blog posts in an instant drawing content from your activities on various social sites like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Digg, FaceBook, LinkedIn etc.

Update: I killed LifeStream – the developer stopped support and I did not revive it after migrating to WordPress.

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Uncyclopedia

Posted by on December 23, 2008 2 comments

This must be the only site you will really need to get the knowledge straight from the people. Where else can you find out that grot is a name for an ugly female (also sometimes: gruk, greveldonkie, grafsteen) – you can read up on it in the Cape Town-entry.

Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. You might say it puts the “psych!” in “encyclopedia”. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament, but unlike Congress or Parliament, they do have a sense of humor.

The mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide the world’s misinformation in the least redeeming and most searingly sarcastic and humorous way possible. Offense is exceptionally likely, expected, and to be renowned while reading the Uncyclopedia.

Perhaps the only rule at Uncyclopedia is to avoid mass spamming so that the pages can be hated by specific groups on their own basis, rather than because there’s a disgusting man holding his anus. Ridiculous and graphic contexts should be kept to their own categories.

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