And I know it’s a repost, but I find this comic just as funny every time I see it – hopefully you will too!

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. The DQ #22 – September 13, 2007 (Rosh Hashanah Version)
2. More Rosh Hashanah Goodness, Courtesy of Wondermark
3. Isn’t It Time for Some Football Already?

Note: This is one of a series of posts I'm doing about exporting your Vox content to other sites.  See here for my introductory post about porting your main blog over.

Budd was kind enough to do some research into the path to transfer your Vox blog over to Blogger, if Google's platform sounded like a better fit for where you want your Vox content to end up.  Here's a copy of his post, reposted here:

If you want to give blogger a try or have a blogger account already and you want to import stuff to it, you can export from wordpress once you convert and then convert it using this site.  Once it is converted you are all set.  it looks like the pictures just get linked from wordpress and the book covers, video, audio are linked to vox and will go away when vox does.  The conversion site says it can only handle small blogs of 1mb but mine was 4 and it handled it fine.  If you have a problem you can do it in chunks as WP lets you export by date, tag, etc.  Hope this helps someone,  Happy moving.

Hopefully, this helps some folks out there who were interested in going to Blogger but weren't sure how to get there from here.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!
2. State of the Vox Export Tool
3. Exporting to TypePad – Bugs and Workarounds

Note: This is one of a series of posts I’m doing about exporting your Vox content to other sites.  See here for my introductory post about porting your main blog over.

For those folks who wanted to export to TypePad, you may have experienced or heard about a bug there that is causing people with an already existing TypePad account to fail on the export.  I’ve reported this to the SA staff who have responded personally saying they’re looking into the issue, but I have a workaround in the meantime for you, if you’re anxious to export to TypePad and ensure you have a backup (in case they don’t fix the issue by the end of the month!)

The basic premise of the workaround is that new TypePad accounts seem to export correctly, so all you need to do is create a new TypePad account when it’s time to export your Vox blog.  Two TypePad accounts cannot have the same email address, so you’ll have to decide – if you want to keep your email address, you need to delete (Deactivate) your existing TypePad account.  If you are okay using a new email address, you can keep your old TypePad account.

If you don’t have anything associated with your old TypePad account, there’s no reason to hold on to it.  If you’ve got another blog, or lots of comments you left on other blogs, you’ll have to make a decision about whether to keep it and put your blog on a new account, or hold off and hope SA fixes the issue before the end of the month.

If you Deactivate your account, once you get confirmation that it is gone, you should be able to reuse your email address to create a new TypePad account during the export process.

To Deactivate your account:
1) Go to your dashboard and click on the “Account” menu in the toolbar to the top right
2) On the bottom right, click the link that says “Request to Deactivate my TypePad Account”
3) Read over the info, check the checkbox, and click the button at the bottom that says “Deactivate My Account”
4) Once you get a confirmation email to the address you used for your account, it has been deactivated and that email address is free to use again

In the “Export to TypePad” process, make sure to create a new account instead of choosing to log in to an existing account.  Enter your name, your email address, and your new password.  TypePad should then ask where you want to set up your new blog address, giving you a default choice and an option to pick a new one.  Once you select or type in a valid (i.e. not in use) choice, it should begin the export process.  At that point, you can close the window and walk away – TypePad handles the rest and your blog will be exported as soon as it can crunch through all your old blog posts, pictures, and audio files.

Hope this is helpful for those who were having issues and at least wanted to TRY out TypePad, even if they weren’t sure they wanted to stay with it!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Exporting from WordPress to Blogger
2. Don’t Forget to Back Up Your Audio Files!
3. A Call for Alpha Testers for My Vox Export Tool

Note: This is one of a series of posts I’m doing about exporting your Vox content to other sites.  See here for my introductory post about porting your main blog over.

For those folks who choose to export to TypePad, word on the street is it will back up your audio files and make them available on your new blog there.  But what about those folks who chose to go a different route (e.g. WordPress, Posterous, etc)?  Those export tools don’t back up audio, which may leave you frustrated, especially if you have files that you no longer have on your own computer, for whatever reason.

Two solutions for those folks:

1) Simplest way to back up specific audio files is to download the files individually.  Install my Greasemonkey script (must have Greasemonkey installed first) and then go to the individual page for one of your audio files (e.g. this is a specific page for an audio file).  Once the script is installed, you’ll see a “Link to mp3″ link that you can right-click on and download the .mp3 to your computer.  You’ll have to rename it, but at least you’ll have the file again!

2) You can try a program I wrote a while back called Vaudio to create a list of all of your blog’s files, hyperlinked to the .mp3 files on a single page.  Once you have the list, you can use DownThemAll (or any other download assistant) to download them all at one time to your computer.  The page and the instructions are here (sorry, they’re as clear as I could make them without spending a lot of time on it).  Some caveats to note:

• This is alpha-alpha-alpha software – I did some testing on my own blog and W.B. Mook did some with his library, but I certainly haven’t had a lot of testing or time to bugfix it
• It runs on my webhost’s server, and it crawls your library.  If it can’t get the next page, it thinks it is done.  This means that if Vox is bogged down, or a lot of people are trying to use it, it may not work correctly.  You may want to try again later or download what it listed, copy the URL of the last file listed and use that as the first for next time, so it can keep chunking along.
• PLEASE USE THIS ONLY FOR BACKUP OF YOUR OWN BLOG.  I was never going to make this public without some sort of authentication routine to ensure that you could only grab content from your own blog, but there’s no time for that now.  If you’re grabbing content from other people’s blogs, you’re violating copyright restrictions and can get me in a lot of trouble for hosting a tool that let you do so (see recent Pirate Bay rulings).

I’d urge everyone to back up to TypePad, if for no other purpose than easily and legally backing up your audio files.  But if you have no urge to create and export to a TypePad blog, the above should help you keep your precious audio files that you no longer have on your own computer.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Exporting to TypePad – Bugs and Workarounds
2. A Call for Alpha Testers for My Vox Export Tool
3. Goodbye Vox??? (aka How to Pack Your Bags and Regroup)

Edit: Upon re-reading my post, I realize I sounded a little bitter and accusatory of SixApart.  I am sure their decision to scrap Vox and move everyone out is not one they made easily or without consideration for the dedicated members of the Vox community.  The efforts they have gone through to provide export tools to TypePad and Flickr shows that they do care about the people that made Vox great, and they hope that those folks will have enough faith in them to follow them over to the platform that they DO plan to focus their attentions on.  I'm revising my post below to be a little less negative and try to focus more on what people can do to keep their content, wherever they decide to go from here.

I've been away from Vox for quite some time now, for work reasons and family commitments.  In fact, I probably wouldn't even be posting this today if it wasn't for the announcement that Vox has decided to close its doors and bulldoze the community that has been slipping away quietly in dribs and drabs as people became dissatisfied with what in the recent years has become a sort of pariah of the SixApart group.  As support for the Vox platform declined, so did the number of users who cared to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the tools, poor server loads, and influx of spam comments.  But now even those who stuck around through it all will need to make a decision.  The word is out folks, and it's time to pack your bags hit the road.  Luckily, there's a lot of handy tools and helpful instructions out there to insure that you don't lose your content, and can hopefully transition on to bigger and better things on another blogging platform.

SixApart's primary suggestion is that you transition your Vox blog to TypePad, another one of their blogging products, and one which, based on Steve's recent post and comments below, looks to have A LOT of good people and support behind it to make it a fun and worthwhile product.  Although I have not used it (and thus really can't express an opinion on it), I do recommend you give their Export to TypePad tool a chance and see what all the hooplah is about.  If you don't like it, there are other export options that you can do that I'll go into more detail about.

Right now, your options to export your Vox blog are as follows:

1) Export your blog (posts, photos, and audio) to a free TypePad blog
2) Export your photos and videos to a Flickr account (free or paid Pro)
3) Export your blog (posts, photos) to an alternative service such as WordPress or Posterous

Note: These are not mutually exclusive – you can export your blog + photos and audio to TypePad, and then export your photos + videos to flickr, and do another export of your blog to WordPress or the like)

Vox has #1 and #2 covered in pretty good detail – while logged in, go to www.vox.com and read the info there to see the links to export to TypePad or Flickr.  Also, more info can be found at closing.vox.com – including details of when you'll not be allowed to post anymore, and when you'll not be allowed to get your data any more.

As for #3, my suggestion?  Export to a WordPress blog.  Even if you don't think you're going to use WordPress, they will automatically import your Vox blog (posts and pictures – sorry, it still doesn't do video or music) using their import tool.  Once there, you can easily export your entire blog contents to a single file that can be imported to almost any of the big named blogging platforms out there (there's either direct import or conversion tools).  Plus, your pictures will be hosted by WordPress until you can find somewhere else that you want to host them.

Please note that you can either do a WordPress.com blog (i.e. they host it there) or a self-hosted installation of WordPress on your own site.  If you want to import to a self-hosted wordpress blog without any intervening steps, follow the instructions here to install the import plugins on your self-hosted installation and go to it.

If you're not a WordPress fan and don't want to try TypePad, you can also check out Posterous.  Vox has details and the link to export to Posterous here.  There are also tools that will allow you to import a WordPress blog into Blogger, if that's more of your thing – just export to WP and then use one of those tools to transfer over.

I'd love for my Vox neighborhood to leave me comments to this post for where I can best keep in touch with you.  Just because I've been absent from Vox doesn't mean I want to lose touch with those folks I used to converse with regularly.  It's still going to be a little bit before I'm back in the office and around a computer all day (and thus have time to start posting again) but I'm not giving up on blogging and don't want to stop reading everyone else's funny, insightful, and entertaining blogs just because SixApart decided to nix Vox.

If you guys want to find me, I'll be porting my blog over to http://rossotron.com .  I'll transfer over any comments from this post, too, so if you want to use this as a reference for where to find people, you can check for the related post over on that site to see where people think they'll end up, at least in the interim.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. State of the Vox Export Tool
2. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!
3. Vox Exports to Self-Hosted Blogs Now Even Easier

You’ll be hearing from me again soon – I’ve got a few more things to wrap up for work and then I’ll be back at the computer again and posting regularly.  See you soon!

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Goodbye Vox??? (aka How to Pack Your Bags and Regroup)
2. Political Parties Be Damned…I Want a Real Party!
3. Hey! I’m Not Dead (Yet)!

Two Fridays ago, I got the go-ahead from my doctor to start wearing a regular shoe and get back into walking like a normal human being instead of the clumping, bumbling boot-wearing boy that in itself was a huge improvement over the clanking, creaking crutch-goer immediately following my Achilles tendon surgery. This happy news was eclipsed, however, by the news that with my newly recovered mobility, I would have to go back up to the plant site and play catchup on everything I missed in the previous 2.5 months.

Well, now I'm back up here in Minnesota, and even though the weather is wonderful and the countryside is beautiful, I'm not really enjoying it.  I've got my head down and blinders on trying to get caught up on everything that has changed so I can get back to being a useful contributor to the plant startup effort, and between that and the fact that my wife is once again forced to take care of our kids all by herself, I'm feeling sort of down. Writing has been one of the last things on my mind lately, even though I enjoy it when I sit down and do it. At least this time around I get to go home a lot more often, and I'm restricted to 60 hours a week of work, so it shouldn't be quite so frenzied up here once I finally get caught up. Hopefully, at that point I'll get back to blogging more often, or at least on a semi-regular basis.

Enjoy The Silence

Division Day

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. (Don’t) Enjoy the Silence
2. You Did What Again? And HOW?
3. A “Hole” Other Sort of Problem

Well, now I’m back up here in Minnesota, and even though the weather is wonderful and the countryside is beautiful, I’m not really enjoying it.  I’ve got my head down and blinders on trying to get caught up on everything that has changed so I can get back to being a useful contributor to the plant startup effort, and between that and the fact that my wife is once again forced to take care of our kids all by herself, I’m feeling sort of down. Writing has been one of the last things on my mind lately, even though I enjoy it when I sit down and do it. At least this time around I get to go home a lot more often, and I’m restricted to 60 hours a week of work, so it shouldn’t be quite so frenzied up here once I finally get caught up. Hopefully, at that point I’ll get back to blogging more often, or at least on a semi-regular basis.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFCAAYQILYs

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. (Don’t) Enjoy the Silence?
2. You Did What Again? And HOW?
3. A “Hole” Other Sort of Problem

_

A couple months ago, I wrote about a new ability developed for WordPress.com that allows you to export your Vox blog to a WordPress blog. I was really excited about this at the time, because I'm always in favor of services allowing you to take your data with you when you want to leave – nothing is more frustrating than devoting time/energy to a project/blog/site and then finding yourself with the choice of either staying locked-in to your current situation or giving up all your work and starting over fresh.

At the time, I mentioned that the only way to port from Vox to a self-hosted WordPress blog (i.e. on your own domain, not a WordPress.com sub-domain) was to use WordPress.com as an intermediary – exporting from Vox to WordPress.com, and then exporting a WXR file and importing it into your other blog.  While this technically works (I tried it out), it's a little messy and leaves all the pictures hosted on the WordPress.com domain site, instead of pulling them into your self-hosted site.

Brian Colinger, a developer of WordPress.com and WordPress plugins, contacted me a few weeks ago to let me know that he's now developed a WordPress plugin that you can install on your self-hosted domain that will do the same export functionality as before, but this time directly to your self-hosted blog.  Yep, now there's a Vox exporter to self-hosted blogs!

The process itself is pretty easy, and Brian's post gives step-by-step instructions, so I won't repeat them here.  You have to install the WP_Importer base class plugin first, and then Vox Importer plugin.  Pretty soon, you'll be pulling all your posts over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog!

Just like the ability on WordPress.com, this importer should:

• Imports posts AND comments.  Comments are captured exactly as left on Vox, and the link to the commenter goes back to their Vox blog URL.
• Imports photos from Vox into WordPress.  Yes, photos will be native to WordPress, so they won't just link back to a photo hosted by Vox.
• Imports tags from your blog.  No option to turn this off, but all tags are carried over and used as tags on the WordPress blog.
• Imports ALL posts, not just those made "public".  Adjust privacy settings before or after you import to account for the fact that WordPress doesn't have all the privacy modes that Vox does, but you get all your content carried over when you import!  NOTE: If you don't want a post to be public on your WordPress blog, make it visible to "YOU (hidden)" only before you export/import.  Then it will show up as "Private" on your WordPress blog. All other privacy settings (neighborhood only, friends and family, etc.) will appear on your new WordPress blog as public, accessible-by-anyone entries until you change their privacy level from within WordPress.
• Maintains formatting from your Vox blog – bullets, numbering, centering, font colors, etc all carry over 1:1.  This may cause some minor issues on your WordPress blog if the layout doesn't support (e.g. white font on a white background), but you can edit this after the fact to suit.

Hat's off to Brian for another job well done! Stop by his blog and leave a comment for him on the post if you end up using the plugin, and let him know how it went.  Also, if you have any further questions/bug reports, be sure to let Brian know so he can fine-tune this plugin for all the folks out there that had no choice but to remain with Vox, lose their work, or laboriously copy it by hand to another platform!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Vox Exports to Self-Hosted Blogs Now Even Easier
2. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!
3. State of the Vox Export Tool

At the time, I mentioned that the only way to port from Vox to a self-hosted WordPress blog (i.e. on your own domain, not a WordPress.com sub-domain) was to use WordPress.com as an intermediary – exporting from Vox to WordPress.com, and then exporting a WXR file and importing it into your other blog.  While this technically works (I tried it out), it’s a little messy and leaves all the pictures hosted on the WordPress.com domain site, instead of pulling them into your self-hosted site.

Brian Colinger, a developer of WordPress.com and WordPress plugins, contacted me a few weeks ago to let me know that he’s now developed a WordPress plugin that you can install on your self-hosted domain that will do the same export functionality as before, but this time directly to your self-hosted blog.  Yep, now there’s a Vox exporter to self-hosted blogs!

The process itself is pretty easy, and Brian’s post gives step-by-step instructions, so I won’t repeat them here.  You have to install the WP_Importer base class plugin first, and then Vox Importer plugin.  Pretty soon, you’ll be pulling all your posts over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog!

Just like the ability on WordPress.com, this importer should:

• Imports posts AND comments.  Comments are captured exactly as left on Vox, and the link to the commenter goes back to their Vox blog URL.
• Imports photos from Vox into WordPress.  Yes, photos will be native to WordPress, so they won’t just link back to a photo hosted by Vox.
• Imports tags from your blog.  No option to turn this off, but all tags are carried over and used as tags on the WordPress blog.
• Imports ALL posts, not just those made “public”.  Adjust privacy settings before or after you import to account for the fact that WordPress doesn’t have all the privacy modes that Vox does, but you get all your content carried over when you import!  NOTE: If you don’t want a post to be public on your WordPress blog, make it visible to “YOU (hidden)” only before you export/import.  Then it will show up as “Private” on your WordPress blog. All other privacy settings (neighborhood only, friends and family, etc.) will appear on your new WordPress blog as public, accessible-by-anyone entries until you change their privacy level from within WordPress.
• Maintains formatting from your Vox blog – bullets, numbering, centering, font colors, etc all carry over 1:1.  This may cause some minor issues on your WordPress blog if the layout doesn’t support (e.g. white font on a white background), but you can edit this after the fact to suit.

Hat’s off to Brian for another job well done! Stop by his blog and leave a comment for him on the post if you end up using the plugin, and let him know how it went.  Also, if you have any further questions/bug reports, be sure to let Brian know so he can fine-tune this plugin for all the folks out there that had no choice but to remain with Vox, lose their work, or laboriously copy it by hand to another platform!

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Vox Exports to Self-Hosted Blogs Now Even Easier
2. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!
3. State of the Vox Export Tool