Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Because of major server issues, it is imperative that anyone who has content on the Manila server hosted by Harvard get whatever content they would like in the next two weeks. The server administrators need to shut the server down permanently.

Information about migrating from the Manila server to the WordPress server is available in the help documentation.

Before blog group this week, there will be a special meeting from 6 to 7 pm dealing with migrating blogs from Manila to WordPress and getting content off the Manila server. j will demonstrate how to migrate a weblog.

If you plan to try to migrate your Manila weblog to the WordPress server during the demo, you will need to bring a computer with working wireless capabilities, remember at least one administrator username and password to the Manila weblog, and have access to the administrator e-mail account.

If you would like to backup your weblog before migration using Wget or Manila’s backup capabilities, you should probably do that before the meeting. Wget takes a long time, but provides a good backup in HTML. The Manila backup is rather fast, but it produces a file only another Manila server administrator can work with.

The server administrators hope people will move their content by Monday, April 9 Wednesday, April 11. Because of the urgency of the situation, everyone needs to act fast. Your cooperation and understanding is appreciated.

Addendum 3/28: The server administrators posted a note about the need for migration. They adjusted the date by two days. People now have until April 11 to get their content off Manila.

Also, Kim posted some Python scripts and instructions for using them to backup a Manila blog into HTML files on j’s scratchpad. j will discuss these scripts and how to use them at the meeting Thursday night.

Addendum 3/29: I ran the script to backup this weblog last night. It has 650 blog posts on it. It took approximately 2 hours to run. However, I realized this morning the script misses a major section of the weblog: the Stories. If I have time today, I will try to fidget with the script to get that download working.

Are you a member of this or another Manila blog? Do you want to change your password? A blogging friend showed me how to do this. Please note that neither of us tried this with a managing editor account. Theoretically, it should work, but it hasn’t been tested.

1. Log in. (Forgot your password or need one? On the Log in screen (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/[blogdirectory]/member/login), type your e-mail address in the top box, then click Login and it will e-mail a password to you.)
2. Go to the Member Sign Up Form: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/[blogdirectory]/member/signUp
3. Type in the e-mail address your account uses
4. Type whatever you’d like as a password
5. The blog will reset your password to the new password.
6. You might receive a welcome message from the blog in your e-mail account.

Not a member? Want to join? Complete the Member Sign Up Form and you’re all set: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/[blogdirectory]/member/signUp.

Why join? Well, mostly it’s a way for this blog to remember who you are, which makes commenting much easier. Also, if you’re a member, you can edit your comments on this blog.

The other night, I encountered these errors when I tried to post some news items and update a tagline:

“Sorry! There was an error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “referer” hasn’t been defined. The error was detected by Frontier 9.0 in mainResponder.respond. Webmaster: weblogmaster@cyber … .”

and

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “referer”
hasn’t been defined.].

I reported the errors to the weblogmaster and received a response indicating it might have been a problem with some of the software on the computer I was using. Details are linked above.

Manila Referer Error …

This Web page on the Manila Newbies site explains the macro that creates the print-friendly/text-only version of a Manila blog. The macro itself is: {printFriendlyLink ("Text of the link you would like to use")}. Insert this code with the text you’d like to have on your page in your Manila blog’s template to get a print-friendly/text-only version of your blog and its contents. The resulting page uses the Print-Friendly Template, an editable version of which is in the advanced preferences.

Print-friendly/Text-only Versions of Manila Blogs …

Here’s a reminder about how to backup a Harvard blog:

• Log in to the blog as a managing editor
• Go to http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/theblog/downloadMySite/MySite.root, but replace theblog with the directory of the blog. You should copy and paste or type the URL into your browser instead of following the link. For example, the URL to backup this blog is http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings/downloadMySite/MySite.root. (You’ll get an error message if you click the link for this blog and you aren’t logged in as a managing editor of the site.)
• The server will think for a little while, then you should see a message like:

  “Download My Site

  Your site is ready for download.

  Download the following link to disk:

  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/siteDownloads/theblog.root”

  theblog should be the directory of the blog. For this site, it would be http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/siteDownloads/thursdaymeetings.root.

• Download/save that file.

Instructions are also available on the Weblogs at Harvard Law site.

A few of us Thursday night bloggers are considering doing a few workshops for people who would like to know about some of the more advanced features of the blogs on Harvard’s server. We just finished a series of classes at MIT to introduce people to blogging and walk them through setting up their blogs. The proposed course would be a sequel to that. We’d like to get input from people who blog on Harvard’s server to get some ideas about what we should cover in our class. We already plan to cover:

• TrackBack
• How to change colors and themes
• Departments
• Adding navbar navigation/links to the aggregator, stats, departments, etc.
• The built-in aggregator and subscribing to blogs
• Images
• What stories, pictures, and gems are
• Uploading things to the blog
• Editing the HTML templates and style sheets
• Backing it up and how to get it restored
• An introduction to copyright issues
• Libel and slander

If you have any suggestions, please comment below or bug j. We will let people know when the classes are.

I posted instructions for enabling TrackBack on a Harvard-hosted blog a while ago on my own blog.

Sun suggested that we begin including “how to” and help stuff on the Thursday Meetings blog. Since one of the initial functions of the Thursday night meeting was to provide a forum for people with support questions, it seems like a good idea (as long as we don’t get overwhelmed).

How to Enable TrackBack …

Here are the instructions for people blogging on Harvard or MIT’s blog server or using Manila to share their subscription lists via Share Your OPML.

How Harvard/Manila Bloggers Can Share Their OPML …