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The Big Drupal to WordPress Move: Any Suggestions?

The great Performancing redesign is underway, and as I’ve been telling the team, it’s not only the redesign that will take much time and thought, but rather also the big move from Drupal to WordPress. I’ve been doing research on how this can be done. Unlike most other blogging platforms, the migration would not be a simple export-import operation, but rather, it would require some playing around with the database.

Sure, that can be learned and there’s nothing that cannot be accomplished with a bit of trial and error (of course, not on the live Performancing.com installation). But then I would like things to be as painless as possible, so if you have done a Drupal-to-WordPress migration yourself, I’d love to hear from you.

Also, one big question I’m facing is what to do with the existing content. For one, Performancing.com curently hosts thousands of blog posts and forum discussions, and this includes member-written blog posts. The team has decided to focus on importing into WordPress only the content written by the core Performancing editors and team members (past and present). The blog posts written by the community members would then have to be moved elsewhere. This is to make sure we don’t have an unwieldy amount of articles, which would definitely be against our intent of making the site more manageable.

Even then, this would require some discretion on our part. Firstly, importing articles would mean we have to preserve permalink structures (including paths) of these posts. Or would we rather just start fresh? One thing we could do is just keep just the more popular or the feature articles in their original path/permalink structures, and keep all the others under an archive. This might mean broken links and missing articles, which would be a pain for users who come across Performancing from the search engines.

Again, there are tradeoffs in this case. My question is whether we are willing to sacrifice some traffic for a faster, leaner site. And to what extent?

I think it will all boil down to user expectations. On the team’s part, the reason we’re doing a reboot is because we think Perf is due for some shakeups. We need fresh perspectives. We need something new. It ain’t broken, per se, and that’s why we’re breaking it, so to speak.

And so on your part, how do you think we can best handle the big move?

Fresh perspective from meeting in the flesh

While today’s Daily Mail article suggesting that Facebook (and its ilk) could be bad for your health (“raise your risk of cancer” as the sensationalist tabloid likes to put it) has already been mocked and parodied, I still think there’s an underlying lesson to be learnt.

For all the wonderful levels of communication that blogging, microblogging and social networking brings, there’s still a lot to be said for face-to-face, person-to-person engagement.

Of course, services like Twitter and feed aggregators help me to stay in touch on both a personal and professional level with a great many people that I might never, or infrequently, see in person due to geography. However, there’s a lot to be said for initiatives like the Weblogger Meetup Group for those of us who spend a great deal of time attached to a computer to get outside and interact.

There are many things that can be done at a real meeting that just don’t translate via online social networks. Drinking beer, for one.

For all the advances in technology, there’s nothing to beat sharing and brainstorming ideas and just getting to know people when you’re in the same room as them.

Of course it doesn’t just have to be other bloggers that we choose to meet in this way. Just as there’s more to finding and researching ideas for blog posts than Google, there’s a lot of inspiration to be found by getting back to the “real world”, at least once in a while.

What strategies do you use to connect with people away from the Internet?

Taking Support To A Personal Level With Twitter

If you operate either a brick and mortar or an online business, you’d do yourself some good by having a Twitter account associated with your business. Why you might ask? Because this account can be used to develop personal relationships with not only your customers but also enables you to grow your online presence. One other benefit that using Twitter provides is the ability to right a wrong.

What the web has enabled customers to do so easily now a days is to speak out against a bad customer service experience or, simply moan and complain about a product or service. Companies that are in the know should have someone dedicated to watching their online presence to monitor situations in which someone has a bad experience. For example, the other day on Twitter, I had mentioned that Ustream.TV sucked because none of the videos as well as the chatrooms ever loaded for me. A few minutes later, I received a reply from a Ustream support representative through Twitter. I discussed my issues with them which were then handled on the Ustream site. As it turns out, I helped Ustream discover a weird anomaly that was only seen a few times before. I worked directly with a customer support representative and resolved the issue.

A few minutes after that, I sent out a Tweet apologizing for my rant against the service and then commended them. Not only did they turn a wrong into a right, but this was all done in the public’s eye. Using email is ok, so is phone support, but with immediate action taking by Ustream using a service such as Twitter, they were able to convince me that they care not only about what people say about their service in the public lime light, but also about customer service.

To make a long story short, use services like Twitter to monitor what the public is saying about your business. Try to right wrongs and do your best to offer personal care and support. Turning a wrong into a right can really boost the positive word of mouth effect such as the case with me and Ustream. As a business, using services like Twitter to leverage your customer service experience can only be a good thing. It’s great for businesses and even better for consumers. A win-win situation.

Three Reasons Good Ideas are Like Kidney Stones

I’d been going through what was possibly among the most difficult days of my life, or so I thought, as I cringed in pain on my bed the other night. My kidney stones have recurred. And kidney stones are something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The pain doesn’t go away. Actually it eventually does, but I can’t guarantee it won’t be without bloodshed. Seriously.

And so after a visit to the doctor, a few pills prescribed, and much liquid intake, I’m optimistic this will all come to pass (pun intended) soon. Otherwise, I might have to face surgery, which is something most people would dread.

Note that when the doc says to take it before bedtime, make sure you do, unless you want to be a groggy slobbering mess all day, like I probably am right now. And then the fun of it all is that I’ve started to think of great ideas as like kidney stones. Let me outline the reasons.

First, like any ideas, good or bad, great ideas can just come out on their own. Your conscious mind might not know it, but your creative genius could have been creating masterpieces right under your nose. It could be a great business idea. Or it could be a really useful web app. Or that link-worthy blog post. Or yet another reinvention of the wheel. It has happened. Most of my most active blog posts (traffic, discussions and links) were those written on a whim–on topics that I didn’t really think were very serious.

Stones can pass out on their own, too. They probably have free will of their own. So can ideas.

Some great ideas, though, could use a little nudge before you can fully harness them. Sometimes you need inspiration. But most of the time, you need to put up with some perspiration. You have to really look deep to see what great things you can come up with if you put your mind to it. Maybe you’re creating a new plugin or some new software, but you keep facing roadblocks in development. Maybe you’re writing a feature article, and you get writer’s block. Perhaps you just need a little nudge toward the right direction and you’ll be on your way fine.

Some stones are probably stuck somewhere inside your body, but are still small enough to pass. But with some medication, lots of water and a bit of faith, these will run their course and leave your system when the time is right.

However, some ideas aren’t as easy to come around. Maybe you do have great things in mind. But some of these might require vast amount of resources to execute. Perhaps you need VC funding. Maybe you need to buy tons of equipment and hardware to execute it. You might even need to hire a handful of people to help you with conceptualizing, developing, designing, marketing, and whatnot, just so your project would get on its way, and your ideas would reach fruition.

Sometimes kidney stones are just too big to pass naturally. You need more than a nudge. You need to have them crushed into millions of little pieces. Laser usually works. So do shock-waves. But the worst case scenario is that the doctor would have to slice you up, open up your kidneys from the outside, and then pull out the offending build-up of calcium, struvite or whatever it is that makes up those darn stones.

At the height of blogger’s block, I often feel like I want someone to crack open my skull and extract ideas directly from my brain so I can start writing about these.

This is probably a crazy analogy. I think my meds are getting to my head.

The Psychology Of Link Baiting

Ryan Caldwell who I think of as someone who really knows his stuff regarding human psychology and the web has published an interesting look into the psychology involved with creating link bait material. As Ryan mentions in his article and I agree, the best types of links you can get are human powered. That is, people publishing content with a link to your site within that content. The article covers three basic areas:

  1. Evoke Re-active Emotions
  2. An Appeal To Reason
  3. Polishing It Off

When I first started writing for Performancing.com when it was under the editorial directive of Ryan, I had a couple of interesting conversations with him regarding how to create link bait material and his tips have provided beneficial to me when put into practice. To make a long story short, he has his pulse on what makes people tick and his SearchEngineJournal piece provides just a glance into his link baiting strategy.

Obviously it works because here I am linking to the article!

Password Management/Generators And Tips

With the recent events surrounding the PHPbb.com website being hacked to the point where the intruder gained access to a number of passwords from registered users, I’ve stepped back to take a serious look at the way I manage passwords for user accounts across the web. I’ll admit that for a long time now, I’ve been playing with fire regarding the way in which I manage passwords and accounts. I really don’t want to get burned so I’ve searched the web for a couple of Password Management applications as well as password generators and this is what I found.

Password Management:

Roboform – I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard Roboform suggested by my friends and colleagues. Roboform is available for Windows and has been reviewed by major publications such as PC Magazine, Download.com and PC World. This software not only stores passwords for user accounts but you can also use it to auto fill forms e.g. forum registration pages. Roboform also contains a synchronization tool called GoodSync where you can sync up your passwords between two different systems. I’ve recently purchased a copy of Roboform and I’ll be writing my own review about it in the near future.

KeePass – While a Roboform license can set you back $29.95, KeePass is a free open source password management application for Windows. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). KeePass appears to be actively developed since the last update to the occurred on February 13th.

Password Generators:

If you’re one of those types who would rather manually store your passwords in a text file for each website you have an account with, here are a few random Password generators to use since at the very least, you should never use the same password for more than one account. Most of your password generators are web based these days so generating a password is just a click away.

Secure Password Generator – Secure Password Generator created by PCTools.com gives you the options to choose a password length between 4-64 characters, phonetics, whether or not to include letters, numbers, mixed case or special symbols. You can also choose the quantity of passwords to create.

GRC Password Generator – My favorite and probably most well known Password generators on the web is Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passwords. Steve has ensured that the passwords generated are as random as possible and with the strings being 64 characters in length, that is more than enough for most websites. Unlike other password generators, this one doesn’t provide any options for you to manipulate the output but that is not an issue considering Steve has done the hard work for you when creating the passwords.

Bytes Interactive – Bytes Interactive is another Password Generation site that provides more options than most when creating passwords. You can choose to exclude specific characters and set which Typewriter position the passwords will appear. As with the first generator, you can also choose the character size and the number of passwords to generate.

Conclusion:

I’ve highlighted just a small sampling of what’s out there in terms of password generation and password management. But there is more to passwords than simply managing and generating them. Here are a few common sense tips for using passwords.

  • Create a good (strong) password:
  • Protect your Password
  • Change your password regularly
  • Avoid common names, dates, phone numbers or things easily associated with you
  • Avoid common words
  • Don’t use naturally occurring keyboard sequences

I mentioned earlier that you should never use the same password for more than one login. The reasoning behind this huge. First off, the more sites you register an account with that use the same password, the higher the risk you are placing on having at least one of those sites compromised to the point where they obtain your password which could then be used on any other site you used that password on. This is why password management software is a big business now adays since it takes the hard work out of the equation. Just make sure that the data inside whatever software package you choose encrypts the data inside the database as you wouldn’t want someone gaining access to your PC by way of a Trojan horse where they can access that information.

If you have any more tips, tricks, or password management software suggestions, please leave a comment and let us know about them.

Has Blogging Taken a Toll on Your Health?

A few weeks back I had a severe bout of hyperacidity. Prior to that I had developed this habit of consuming about five to six cups of coffee per day. And that wasn’t your usual creamy, sugary coffee, as I often prefer my coffee black. And with two heaping tablespoons of ground beans in every cup I brew, one would think that’s a recipe for disaster eventually.

Add to that my habit of staying up to the wee hours of the morning, emailing, writing, tweaking designs and doing blog fixes. Stress gets to you. And it sometimes takes a toll on your life when you least expect it.

And so after that episode, I have cut back on my coffee consumption. I stopped my caffeine habit for about a week (much to the chagrin of the lady who sells me beans, I think). I eventually started drinking one to two cups a day after that, but these days it’s mostly as a morning jump-starter, and to help with after-dinner digestion.

I’ve also tried to get more sleep. I’m usually most productive in the first two to three hours past midnight, because of the peace and quiet. And so the loss in sleep I try to catch up for by napping in the afternoons (along with the kids). It’s still a big adjustment, and I’m still having a host of other health issues (like kidney stones recurring). But I think giving oneself a break is essential to productivity, especially for those of us who write.

Has blogging–as a hobby or as a business or career–taken a toll on your health? In what way? And what are the things you do to keep healthy and sane?