Author Archives: Richii

Tikiwiki Migration to WordPress Notes – Part 1

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A short article on how to perform a Tikiwiki migration to WordPress.

I’ve been using Tiki Wiki CMS for quite some time. The software was up to it’s job and added loads and loads of features for a fully-qualified CMS for which you need lots of permission settings, features like blogs, galleries, forums and link directories, etc. I’d always made lots of customisations to my Tiki install, so upgrades were always a bit of a pain. I recently discovered a WordPress For Beginners Magazine which showed that WordPress offered lots of great functionality with lots of active development. It offered a lean base from which you can add modules which are relevant to your site.

Here’s a brief set of steps in performing a TikiWiki migration over to WordPress 3.3.1:

  1. Dump out your TikiWiki database articles into a CSV file and save it to the desktop (script to follow)
  2. Create the MySQL database and user which you’ll use for WordPress:
    create database wordpressdbname;
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpressdbname.* to wordpressuser@localhost
    identified by ‘some_password’ with GRANT OPTION;
  3. Unpack WordPress into a clean directory and perform a normal install
  4. Go to the Plugins section and install and activate the following plug-ins:
    WordPress SEO by Yoast
    CSV importer
    Advanced Excerpt
    Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast
  5. Using the CSV importer module, upload your CSV file containing all of your articles. If successful, you will get something like this: “Imported 269 posts and 0 comments in 35.36 seconds” If not, check your CSV file to make sure all the quotation marks are appropriately escaped
  6. Set your site title and tag lines under Settings. Also set your preferred date format.
  7. If you don’t want to enable comments, click on Settings -> Discussion:
    Uncheck: Allow people to post comments on new articles
    Check: Users must be registered and logged in to comment
  8. Follow the setup for Google Analytics and WordPress SEO.
  9. Chose a theme like Reflex Plus. In order to use this WordPress theme all you have to do is, upload the Reflex Plus Theme package through (WordPress Dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes -> Upload) and Activate it like you do for any other WordPress theme.
  10. Optionally, edit the Reflex Plus theme’s header.php as follows
    Add the following lines:
    <meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX, FOLLOW, NOCACHE, NOARCHIVE” />
    <meta name=”revisit-after” content=”1 days” />Change the following lines:
    <title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); wp_title();?></title>
    to
    <title><?php wp_title(”); ?></title>
  11. Copy over favicon.ico from your old Tikiwiki directory to the new one
  12. One nice feature about WordPress SEO by Yoast is that you can perform online SEO Page Analysis before you submit the post.  This requires PHP’s Document Object Model.  If you don’t have this installed, you will get the error “Error: your hosting environment does not support PHP’s Document Object Model. To enjoy all the benefits of the page analysis feature, you’ll need to (get your host to) install it.”   Check your PHP installation to see if DOM/XML is enabled.  On Red Hat Enterprise Linux if you are using the IUS Community repository and LAMP stack, you can just perform a simple “yum install php53u-xml”

That all for now – more to follow later.

Birmingham City Football Club Ticket Sales – A Lack of Transparency

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This Christmas I thought it would be a nice surprise to take my family to the Birmingham City v West Ham football match on Boxing Day. Unfortunately, the BCFC ticket policy means they would rather I turn up alone than with family.

Below is an extract of an email sent to Birmingham City Football club describing the lack of transparency of their current system. No reply was received by Birmingham City, and since my original e-mail I’ve become aware of others that have been denied ticket sales. Many thanks for your response over Twitter regarding purchasing a ticket for the West Ham game on Boxing Day. I was trying to purchase a ticket for my wife and I for this game.

From your comments and my wife’s telephone conversation with the ticket office on Thursday, my understanding is that I am allowed to purchase a ticket for this game as I have done so in the past. However, I cannot a purchase ticket for my wife as she has only registered recently.

As a football club that makes many claims about being family and female friendly, a family visit to St Andrews on Boxing Day seems an appropriate activity. Indeed, I expect many Blues fans who live outside of Birmingham are likely to be in the area over Christmas and would want to attend. However, the current system is actually stopping families from attending. I can attend on my own, but not with any family members.

1. The e-ticket registration confirmation email is sent from welcome@email.bcfc.com and invites you to “hit reply to this email” if you have queries. As per your note on Twitter this appears to be invalid so I believe that my wife’s emails to this address have gone unread. Would it be possible to correct this initial email to give the correct address someone can reply to?

2. I have not been able to find anything on the website about the tickets for West Ham being only available to prior members. You mention this is advertised as being the case, so please could you provide me with the link that states this. Part of my frustration is that it’s not clear who can/cannot purchase tickets – clicking through the ticketing website states that they are “on general sale”.

3. My initial attempt to purchase tickets was online on Sunday night. Originally, I had planned to get the tickets as a Christmas surprise for my wife. However, after selecting the seats the site stated that “Not all items in your basket were assigned to members. Please use “assign” to do this, or remove the offending items using “remove”. My natural response was to create an account for my wife and submit her details. That also meant the tickets were no longer a surprise as she soon received the welcome email. Believing that I would now be allowed to purchase her ticket, I assigned her seat and was then shown the message “Unfortunately, one or more items in your basket is assigned to a newly registered client, which is not allowed”.

This process was most frustrating and at no point was I made aware that despite registering my wife she would still not be able to accompany me.

4. During my wife’s conversation with the ticket office, a number of different reasons were cited as to why she could not purchase a ticket. These included the steps were taken “to stop West Ham fans buying tickets”, “at the Board’s request”, “at police request”, “you registered at a London address, if you were in Birmingham you would be allowed to purchase tickets”. In relation to point 2, if the intention is stop West Ham fans from purchasing tickets, please can you clarify what process you are using to decide who can/cannot purchase tickets. I am a legitimate fan, but I am unable to make a purchase despite the tickets being advertised as being “on general sale”.

5. If I ask my mother to visit the ticket office to purchase tickets, or I visit the ticket office on Christmas Eve with my wife, would we be permitted to purchase tickets?

In closing, this problem appears to have affected others, as described here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8f8gY21EWkgJ:birminghamcityforum.co.uk/index.php%3Fshowtopic%3D2790%26view%3Dgetlastpost+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a

Of course, the users in the above post could be West Ham fans trying to sneak into the game, and I appreciate there’s a need to keep the stadium safe, but it just seems to me that the current approach in screening ticket purchases does not work, is not family friendly and is not transparent.

Let’s Get The Party Started

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Operating Systems! I love them! You can’t beat that feeling of booting up an installer, blasting the partition table, selecting your applications and watching the estimated time to completion box count down to zero. Exciting stuff. And then you get to try out all the new whiz-bang features. But would I go as far as hosting a party for this process? Apparently you can…..

However, as good as those suggestions sound, I reckon you can spice it up even more by replacing the x-rated beeps in the next clip with – well – use your imagination!

Need more spice? 20 Ways to Spice up Your Windows 7 Launch Party

Oh, and if you’re thinking of having balloons at your party, think again! Microsoft pulls Windows 7 balloons from Euro ‘launch parties’ (I guess Europeans can’t be trusted to not go around bursting them and startling guests)

Love Is All That Matters

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Whilst searching for some previously un-heard (to me) Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis tracks the other day, I discovered Crash by The Human League. The 1986 album features 3 Jam & Lewis tracks: Human, I Need Your Loving and Love Is All That Matters. Lots of good stuff on the Wikipedia page about this album: 3 of the band members left during/after it’s creation due to conflicts with Jam & Lewis, but it also spawned a US Number One with the track Human.

Anyhow, here is the 3rd single to be released from the album. According to Wikipedia “The music video was a result of Virgin Records beginning to lose faith in the Human League and being reluctant to invest in any further elaborate music videos; so the video was kept deliberately low budget.” The track was written and produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis and carries their distinct sound. Enjoy!

James Bond Monday – Gladys Knight – Licence To Kill

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Monday morning on 13 July 2009 can only mean one thing: James Bond! This weekend I rented The Best Of James Bond – 30th Anniversary Collection because I really wanted to hear my fave JB theme: Licence to Kill. (PS it’s licence in the UK, but license in the US!)

Time for some fun facts about it c/o Wikipedia: The song (one of the longest to ever be used in a Bond film) was composed by Narada Michael Walden, Jeffrey Cohen and Walter Afanasieff. It was based on the “horn line” from Goldfinger, which required royalty payments to the original writers. The music video of “Licence to Kill” was directed by Daniel Kleinman, who later took over the reins of title designer from Maurice Binder for the 1995 Bond film, Goldeneye.

More hits from Narada Michael Walden to appear here later, but for now, here’s Gladys:

Journey of a credit card payment

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Time for a techie good-stuff video! I know that you’re already reading the title and thinking how can a credit card payment be interesting? Well, with some fancy graphics and a lovely young lady describing it, it’s super aces! Watch he journey of a credit card payment as it travels 30,000 kilometres in 1.4 seconds!