Adding Evernote Site Memory to your blog
posted by robert | filed under tutorials/samples, WordPress
Take a look at the bottom of this post and you’ll a nice little green “remember” button. That’s the Evernote Site Memory button – a very cool little widget offered by Evernote to allow visitors to my blog to add any single blog entry as a note in their Evernote databases… a very useful little addition for any blog and a great way to simplify the process of saving notes for those visitors who use Evernote actively.
To make it easier to add to a WordPress blog, there is a WP Evernote Site Memory Plugin available. Be careful though – if your WordPress theme doesn’t wrap each individual post in a div with a post ID then you won’t be able to get the plugin working straight away and will wonder why your browser hangs when you click the button!
This was the case for my blog and I had to add the following code to my blog’s index.php and single.php files (just inside the loop which builds up individual posts) to make sure it worked correctly:
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
Closing the div just before the end of the loop finishes off the job. This part of my blog’s index.php now looks like this:
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- added -->
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
....... other code ......
<span class="date"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></span>
</p>
<!-- added -->
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
Once the posts are all correctly tagged with post IDs the plugin works a treat!
If you don’t use Evernote yet to collect and organise notes then get yourself over to their site and sign up for free now! 
tags: Evernote, Site Memory, WordPress
Importing blog entries from b2evolution to WordPress 3.x
posted by robert | filed under general, social media, WordPress
After a few aborted attempts, I finally managed to import the contents of my old b2evolution-based blog into this new one yesterday evening.
The answer turned out to be as simple as other sites had suggested: Save the RSS feed of my old blog in a file and import it via the RSS importer built into WordPress. My initial attempts had failed as I had simply clicked the “reader” link in Safari and then saved the source of the displayed page. Importing that simply won’t work as Safari seems to mess things up.
So, here’s how it goes:
(ps: please check the word of warning below…)
- open up your b2evolution-based blog
- right-click on the RSS 2.0 link displayed by your skin – this is normally on the sidebar somewhere – and save the linked file on your local machine:
- in WordPress Admin, Tools, Import from the left.hand menu:
- choose RSS:
- …and select the file you’ve just downloaded before clicking “Upload file and import”
The import may take a while but you’ll soon see a list of “Importing post… done” messages and all should be good! If the import doesn’t bring in all posts from your old blog then you can check what’s been imported and remove these from the downloaded feed file before importing again.
A word of warning:
As those of you who follow me in Twitter (and were already following me last night) noticed, my WordPress blog using the TweetButton plug-in AND I had not switched OFF this plug-in before importing. The plug-in caused a tweet to be posted for every single post imported!
Thankfully, my followers are very tolerant:
OK, mostly… I did get a new mention though – for something I wrote probably a year ago Once more, my apologies for spamming your timelines last night. I couldn’t even apologise yesterday because the large number of Tweets put me over my daily quota!
So. End-result all good. My old blog entries are now here and there’s no need for me to send site/blog visitors to my old blog. All that’s left now is for me to create some .htaccess rules to ensure that inbound links to my old blog are redirected here – don’t forget this when you import an old blog!
Happy blogging!
tags: b2evolution, new blog, RSS import, WordPress
