Migrate (or how to escape) from soup.io to WordPress

Posted by Martin

 

I’ve been using soup.io for over 6 months to save my twitter stream, collect nice music video and host some personal articles. Due to the “not that professional” maintenance of soup.io (several long downtime) and the lake of feature (can’t create and manage tag cloud or category other than manually, search feature is not working), I decided to move to WP and do my own stuff.

The migration of 6 months of data collection from soup.io to WP has been a long and painful journey. Soup.io rss export did not contains all my post (over 500) and was not recognized by WP properly (using the native WP import rss feature).

 

So I’ve look up for a way to move my data using a set of different tools. Below is a quick tutorials describing my main step and the tool I used. At the end of this article an other solution that might work as I did not try it.

Please note that during this migration your tag, guid and publish date will be lost. If you have post from google reader, guid (ie link to the orginal article) will be lost too – I guess my cleaning in google refine lost them.

  • Extract all your posts using the soup downloader (thanks monschein). Soup downloader will do a post is a xml document. So unless you want to import all your articles one by one, we need to have them into a single file.
  • Put them back into a single file using Replace Pioneer (access tutorial – download) to create a single xml document
  • Rename this document as .txt
  • Now we have a nice xml document, with all your post, we want to make it ready to be imported in the wp_post table. To do that we will use google refine  a great tool to clean messy data.
    • create a project by importing your txt document (do not split into columns)
    • Apply the following code using the option apply. Copy every thing and here we go !

 

 

    • Extract data in Excel format.
  • Create a wordpress blog. I won’t describe this step, there is already tons of excellent tutorials all over the web.
  • Import your Excel file in the wp_post table using phpMyadmin interface. Again, there is tons of good tutorials over the web.
    • It has been the longest and most painful part. The import did not happen properly and I had to run a couple of sql queries to rearrange the data properly (in the right field / format …)
  • Connect to WordPress, all your post must be displayed. Select them all and publish them.
  • Install feedwordpress plugin and configure the import you had previously with soup.io.
    • feedwordpress is a rss importer that turn every element in the rss will be turn into a blog. If the element contains tag or category
  • Configure and have fun with WordPress

 

An other option I did not explore, but might work is to:

  1. install a WordPress instance with feedwordpress plugin
  2. configure your soup.io rss.
  3. run the feedwordpress plugin to import the x first elements from soup.io
  4. delete imported element in soup.io
  5. run the feedwordpress to import the next x elements from soup.io
  6. keep repeating 4 and 5 until your soup.io is empty.
Advantages of this methods (if it works):
  • Do not need to use 4 differents interfaces
  • Import post tag and create them into WordPress.
Hope this help. If you have questions, and idea to improve this methods, I’m interested to hear them !

Short film with a twist

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A nice series of 8 short film based on a unexpected twist at the end. My comments are in italic. Title link to the youtube video or other related information. 

5 MINUTE DATING
Peter Hatch | Canada | 2009 | 6 min

SECTION 44
Daniel Wilson | United Kingdom | 2008 | 5 min
Real fun, hilarious ending

BREAK A LEG
Jesse Shamata | Canada | 2009 | 7 min
Nice lovely story.

TENNER
David O’Neill | United Kingdom | 2008 | 12 min
My favorite of the serie. Excellent story telling where the spectator have to rebuild the why. Lot of implicit. 

2:14 PM
Chris Donaldson | Canada | 2009 | 6 min
Boring. Flat twist. 

NULL-NULL
Gaute Johnsen | Norway | 2007 | 4 min
Twist on disable people, I do not support / agree with the message sent.

GOOD ADVICE
Andreas Tibblin | Sweden | 2008 | 15 min
Really funny ending.

MIRACLE FISH
Luke Doolan | Australia | 2009 | 18 min
Scary ! :)

Thinking is bad

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9405_b4e9

Thinking is bad / Pensez c’est mal. 
This post is inspire (or is as a free adaptation) from an article written by a french IT project leader Olivier Mansour under the title Réfléchir c’est mal (thinking is bad).

 

Olivier Mansour illustrates his point with an extract of the comic Dungeon Twilight Vol3, The New Centurions (art: KERASCOËT, text: SFAR et TRONDHEIM p. 16 & 17). Marvin explains to some Dragons Monks how to fly with a new armor using two fire cannons fixed on their arms – see picture attached -.

 

It may look idiot but let’s take a minute to think about what Marvin said:
– he always flew instinctively,
– he never planed or anticipated this, he just done it naturally,
– he explains that the worst would be (to try) to understand how to do it: Thinking is bad.
The rest of Marvin’s explanation is quite surprising as he point out to:
– just go, even if you don’t know exactly what is going to happen,
– don’t over think about the possibility to fail. If something goes wrong we will adjust and
– if we are wrong it is no big deal. It would not be the first time and we are well protected (ain’t we?)

 

In fact Marvin does a criticism of over thinking, a bit like Barney in HIMYM (joking about Ted)
– Lily: Don’t Ted-out about it.
– Ted: Did you just use my name as a verb?
– Barney: Oh, yeah, we do that behind your back. « Ted-out »: to over think. See also « Ted-up ». « Ted-up »: to over think with disastrous consequences. For example, « Billy Tedded-up when he- »

 

– Ted: All right, I get it!
I do like this approach for complex project or initiative, like changing country or starting a large IT project. Just get as quickly as possible the minimum requirement to start in a safe environment. Get the enough specs for developers to code. Once the project on track, we will be able to adjust and correct potential errors. The project moving ahead will create the synergy to get all actors on board and provide more pertinent feedback on process design or functionalities needed.

 

This method also prevent to project to be block in a never ending design phase where we are trying to plan ahead things that might never happen, preventing the project to start.

 

So, don’t be afraid, just go for it!

Smartboard

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Smart board (white board) + smart notebook (software)
Advantages
1. Write down your lesson and export it as pdf / html / ppt. Possibility also to record the lesson
avoid student to copy what the teatcher write on the screen.
2. This is a single application, acting like a layer on windows interface, to add and manipulate contents on the screen (highlight content, screenshot, write over content …)
3. Very close to powerpoint and other MS tool, this make the learning curve from teacher shorter.
Drawbacks
1. User have to move a lot, can be tiring all day long.
2. Single touch interface. Only one user at a time on the board (some collaborative extension using personal pc / tabletts seems to exist). Would be nice to have something like Windows surface or apple mutlitouch technology.
3. Miss some quality content available on Internet. Preparing interactive lesson is highly time consuming.

Social Networks and Health Care @MarsDD

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Access the event page.


Social network  are here to help people with very specific disease to connect with caregiver, doctor, nurse, and family. Through social network patient are able to share and coordinate the community supporting them during.


The 3 usages identified are :
1. Helping patient and their communitiy to go through a situation by helping communication and coordination ;
2. Accessing academic and general information regarding the disease ;
3. Communication between patient and doctors through EMR and message exchange.



eshift program in South West LHIN in Ontario is a iphone application connecting nurse and patient during night shift for home care.  The aim of eshift is to deliver the right care at the right place at the right time.

Bant is an smartphone application who encourage the proper behavior for children / teenager facing diabete. Reminder helps to do the right care at the right place at the right time. Bant also is based on the learning moment (the right time to educate the child) versus the 10min visit with the doctor every 6months. Bant also offer rewards to children behaving using through itune and the appstore.


Discussion panel end up on the following statement and question:
– Social network in healthcare is not a market, it is a mean to improve patient selfcare, communication … This is not a goal in itself.


– Social media in healthcare, cost control or revenue generation tool?