Moving Blogs to Blogger

After much foot dragging and fiddling around, I have finally started moving blogs off of Wordpress on Alia and over to Blogger.

I have started by moving my own blog using Wordpress2Blogger. This pulled the whole message archive, the comments, tags, and pages over including preserving published vs. draft states. This makes the third full migration and fourth platform for my blog so this content has come from fingering (.plan), to a custom PHP blog I wrote the software for myself, to Wordpress, and now to Blogger. And other than some of the initial .plan posts which were never archived, I've managed to keep the entire archive from 2003.

The biggest amount of effort in moving from WP to Blogger is setting up the site layout. Keeping lists of links and pages is pretty much manual but as Blogger has widgets for these, its not particularly onerous. And switching DNS. From what I can tell, the links are all being preserved at least on my own blog so it should be just a matter of waiting.

Once my blog is moved over, I'll move the main Nibble blog and if that works fine, I'll encourage the couple other bits here to move their blogs as well which will get me closer to offloading the last of the applications running on Alia.

Ciao

Email Themes

You can now set your own theme for your webmail -you can upload a background image and possibly more!

http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/04/customize-your-own-inbox-background.html

Email Delegation

I learned just today that you can delegate access in gmail to other users allowing another user to view and user your email - sharing your mailbox without your password. This feature is also available in Google Apps but has to be enabled. So I've enable this on thenibble.org domain. To share a mailbox, login, go to the settings, and on the Accounts tab you can share the mailbox from there. But only to users within the domain and it takes up to an hour for a delegation to become active.

Your Login Now a Google Login

Google is enabling all Google Apps domains (e.g. thenibble.org) to work as authentication for all the services that you would normally need a personal Google account for. This, I think, includes Blogger, Reader, Picasa, and more. Google just posted about this here:

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/ten-times-more-applications-for-google.html

The one thing to be aware of is that if you were previously using your thenibble.org email address as a personal Google account (with Reader, Blogger, etc), you will be prompted the next time you visit one of the applicable services to choose your account. Google assures us that no data will be lost.

For now I have made myself the only "pilot" user of this service. Everyone will be switched over in January 2011 but if you want your account switched sooner, let me know.

Enjoy!

Surf's Up!

Google Wave is available now for Apps and so we now have access to Wave for The Nibble:

http://wave.thenibble.org

It's a handy web-based collaboration app. Basically a glorified white-board in which multiple users can simultaneously collaborate over the Internet. With Wave you can drop-in gadgets to add more features from simple yes/no/maybe polls to mind maps and multi-media.

Enjoy :)
- Arch

Site Updates

Just wanted to post a quick blurb to point out that I've updated various pages around the site including the email and chat setup pages.

Please let me know if I've missed stuff or if there are any heinous errors.

- Arch

Moving to Google Apps

I'm in the process of moving email and chat for thenibble.org over to Google Apps. Google will provide the full reliability of their service along with ease of use and maintenance for a personalized domain for free (up to 50 users).

So all mail will be available via mail.thenibble.org and from here you can setup stuff like mail forwarding or IMAP access etc. Currently, your old mail won't be in the new system, but I intend to do a mass migration of existing mail once the new setup has stabalized a little (within the next week or so).

The other part is chat. Users shouldn't need to change much as I've got "jabber.thenibble.org" pointing to the new server, but these are Google's instructions:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49147

But as I mentioned, "jabber.thenibble.org" points to the right place so where you provide the Jabber server on the advanced tab, you can use either talk.google or jabber.thenibble.

We're still shaking everything out like group chat and that kind of stuff, so I guess it will be a bit of a work-in-progress.

- Arch