With a flick of a switch…

With a flick of a switch I moved my blog from jroller to my own hosted wordpress powered blog. The movers did a great job at packing all my stuff here into nice boxes, and moving it to my new place, including the comments. Even though the moving service was very professional some china may have been broken.

Now why bother moving, and shelling out money for a service that is available for free? Several things triggered me to do the switch:

  • speed: jroller has its bad days when it comes to speed. It hosts several hundreds of blogs and needs to serve them all.
  • editor compatibility: several blog editors exist, but most of them don’t support the roller api. I’m typing this message using Flock, the social browser. Probably it is possible to direct Flock to be able to post to jroller, but I didn’t want to work with a half baked solution.
  • own domain: I like being master of my own little universe, probably a left over from watching He-Man too much during childhood).
  • wordpress: I think it is the best blogging tool around at this moment. Some of the templates are beautiful (vertigo squared, jillij) and more are available. On top of that the spam prevention for comments (akistmet) is great.
  • statistics: being master of my own domain I get statistics for free with my subscription. Who, where from, when, etc.
  • greener grass: when I read the blog of Nathan, I immediately thought: that is what I want: more control, more freedom

So here we are: on martijndashorst.com. I’m still contemplating splitting the Wicket part from my own private life ramblings. However, if I promise to keep the main writing about Wicket with a peek now and then into my personal stuff would you mind?

Soon to be launched: A Wicket Diary at http://wicketdiary.org

Importing JRoller into WordPress

I have moved my blog from jroller.com to a shared provided server (didn’t want to open up my home network just yet). I didn’t want another huge blogging service such as wordpress.com, rather I wanted a bit more control over what I could do with the service. I installed WordPress as my blogging application. Having my own (part of a) server is pretty sweet, too bad it isn’t Java hosted.

My hosting provider is bhosted, a PHP/mysql provider in the Netherlands, and I find the service pretty decent until now. Yes, the domain registration could be smoother, but I doubt it is any worse than other providers.

I wanted to preserve my old blog entries and migrate them to my new home. Unfortunately the wordpress installation doesn’t have a connection to jroller to download all posts and import them. So I searched the internets and found more people facing this problem.

Finally I settled on exporting my entries using the wordpress xml format, and thus preserving the comments made by other people on my blog. I then only had to go through 250+ posts to recategorize them (jroller didn’t put blog entries with category ‘java/wicket’ on the front page).

I really have to thank Zeusville for his efforts in creating the WordPress export template for jroller.

Unusual entry: cats and doors

I usually don’t blog about personal things, and write just about Wicket, or any new, Java related subject I’m excited about, but I’m breaking that habit for this time…

What is the fascination cats have with closed doors? Everytime we shut a door to keep the draft out, a cat immediately wants us to open that door. Sometimes she’ll even grant you 5 minutes couch time, but I just think that is the time they need to realize the door has been shut.

Is there any scientific research being done on how long a cat can be in a (large) room with a closed door before she starts to scratch?