New Town, Same Story

I just finished migrating from a self-hosted Wordpress site to Blogger. Apparently Wordpress expects you to pay for a custom domain while Blogger doesn't. I wanted to keep talesfromthecellar.com, but didn't want to self host anymore. Thankfully, this process wasn't too difficult, with the help of a few articles.

First, you have to get your site data out of Wordpress. I found this article, which helped me do this painlessly. From the steps in there, I now had a backup of my site, and had it converted to Blogger format for importing. But the export does not include images. That's not a big deal since you can download them yourself, but the references in the file point to the old site. Fortunately, another article shows how to use Dropbox to host your images, and then globally update the references in the converted file. That worked great as well.

There was still one more thing I had to do to complete the migration: switch the domain. For this, I found yet another article that detailed every step. It was done in about 30 minutes, and the final DNS redirect happened in less than 2 hours. YMMV.

Once the migration was complete, I had customize the appearance (this is easy in the Blogger interface), and then had some cleanup. I still had missing images on my old site due to being hacked a couple of years ago. About 30K other Wordpress users were as well. I still haven't found all my images. But that's another story. Cleanup also may be necessary for any post elements supported by plugins. I found that the video plugin I used didn't transfer, so I had to manually re-add the references to get the embedded videos to look right. And there are other custom plugins that have similar issues.

But other than a few glitches, the process went really well. Thanks to all the help from other online bloggers!

50 Best Blogs for Moviemakers | MovieMaker Magazine

Movie Maker magazine online posted a list of their choices of the 50 best blogs for movie making. I'm not on the list, :lol: , but there are some other great sites listed. Most I've never even heard of. Take a look, and here's the link to the original article: 50 Best Blogs for Moviemakers | MovieMaker Magazine.

50 Best Blogs for Moviemakers

• Adventures in Self-Releasing
• All About Indie Filmmaking
• All These Wonderful Things
• The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog
• The Art of the Title Sequence
• Ben’s Blog
• The Big Picture
• Blog Stage
• Bright Lights After Dark
• Cinema Tech
• Cinematical
• The Documentary Blog
• The Edit Foundry
• The Editblog
• Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts
• Film Dailies
• Film School Rejects
• The Film Sensei
• Filmmaker Blog
• Filmmaking Stuff
• FilmSound.org
• FreshDV
• GreenCine Daily
• Hammer to Nail
• HD for Indies
• Hollywood Elsewhere
• The House Next Door
• In Contention
• The Independent Eye
• JohnAugust.com
• The Joy of Film Editing
• Just F*ing Entertain Me
• Living Your Dream: An Acting & Film School Blog
• Making the Movie
• A Moon Brothers Film
• The Movie Blog
• MovingPictureBlog
• OnSuper8.org
• Persistence of Vision
• Projector Films
• /Film
• Some Came Running
• StudioDaily
• Thompson on Hollywood
• Totally Unauthorized
• Travel Day
• Truly Free Film
• Twitch
• The Unknown Screenwriter
• Workbook Project

Trying out Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

I've been using Google Chrome for a couple of weeks now and stumbled on this Zemanta plugin. It's an add-on to help bloggers find interesting content to match what they're posting about. It allows you to connect to your friends at the various social networking sites and pull from your RSS feed reader. Might be interesting.

By the way, I'm dangerously close to changing Chrome to my default browser. Sorry Firefox. :(

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Is Zemanta? (yearn2blog.com)

Socialite, a WordPress/Facebook connection plugin

I want to start posting more this year, and I thought a "write once, post everywhere" approach might help. This plugin will supposedly post to the FaceBook news feed whenever I add a post to this blog. I'm starting with FB,  but may add MySpace and possibly...gulp, Twitter at some point.

Here's the link to the plugin: http://www.gilfether.com/socialite/

Update: link didn't show up. Let's see if that's fixed...

Finally Upgraded Wordpress

Thanks to my buddy Stewie, upgrading to 2.6 was a breeze. He suggested installing the automatic upgrade plugin, and it didn't disappoint. The process couldn't have been easier.  On the upgrade page, just click through each step, and after about 5 clicks (and two downloads--the site and database backups), you're done. Wow! :yay:

Oh, and Stewie, Custom Smilies has been updated. The new version is here.

Tales from the Cellar gets its own domain

Welcome to talesfromthecellar.com.

The old domain will remain active for a while, and will resolve to the new one.  So it will mostly be invisible. But it's a lot easier to say, "go to talesfromthecellar.com." Don't cha think?

Camera Mapping in Blender, for Charity.

I read a post on Blendernation, a cornerstone of the Blender 3D community, that I felt bared repeating--for two reasons.

First, Colin Levy (Peerless Productions), created a 30 second public service announcement (PSA) as an entry for PSAId, a contest sponsored by the Center for International Disaster Information (CIDI). It's very impressive and has a strong message; no wonder it was a finalist. You can view his entry here.

Second, because he uploaded a video on how he used Blender 3D for camera mapping in order to create the proper setting for the scene. He also has a full camera mapping tutorial on his Web site.

101's Humorous Yet Sobering Take on NaNoWriMo

Sean Lindsay over at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing has this to say about the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Hint: remember the Infinite Monkey Theory?

Thank God he didn't get into NaBloPoMo.

More Great Blogs for Writers

Here are a few blogs I failed to mention in my previous post, Great Blogs for Writers.

Scriptwriting - Oscar-nominated Roger S. H. Schulman shares knowledge from his experiences writing for TV and film.

The Artful Writer - Craig Mazin, who wrote Scary Movie 3, talks about screenwriting, with a focus on the WGA.

Seriocity - TeeVee writer Kay Reindl (Haunted, Millennium, The Dead Zone) shares witticisms on genre writing for the boob tube. Block some time for these posts; they tend to be long.

The Rejecter - A literary agent's advice to aspiring writers who want to get published. The bad news is about 95% of you won't.

My First Tag

Stewie over at Incoherent Thoughts tagged me with a cultural assignment. Of course that was a month ago, which shows you how long I've been neglecting this blog. Did I just have a kid or something? :lol:

Anyway, here's the assignment: Go to Wikipedia, type in your birthday (month and day) and list 3 events, 2 births, 1 holiday. The tagging has been played out. Besides, I don't get enough readers to tag.

On June 30th, the following crap happened:

Events

1805 - The U.S. Congress organizes Michigan Territory. - so my Aunt would have somewhere to live.

1859 - French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope. - he forgot his barrel.

1997 - First Harry Potter book is published. - and, according to the religious right, the devil worshiping began.

Births

1286 - John de Warenne, 8th Earl of Surrey, English politician - no clue who this is, but he sounds important.

1934 - Harry Blackstone Jr., American magician - *poofed* into existence.

1959 - Vincent D'Onofrio, American actor - Star of Law & Order: CI. He's older than I thought.

Deaths (not mentioned, but I wanted to check anyway)

2003 - Buddy Hackett, American comic - D'oh, Buddy Hacket died on my birthday. Not funny.

Holidays

Independence Day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. - cool!

A Cool Toy for Bloggers

My buddy Stewie, from Incoherent Thoughts, mentioned ScribeFire in his latest post.

In a nutshell, ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that turns the bottom half of your browser into a blog editor. Once you set up a connection to your blog, you can pull this bad boy up and blog away, publishing directly to your blog -- without logging in to your site.

The interface is simple, yet robust, and you can even work with images:

Powered by ScribeFire.