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An interview I did last Friday about my company’s new product launch, Reality Load XF, was published this morning. Pretty cool! If you’re in the market for load testing, check it out.

I’m fully switched over from MovableType to WordPress. First, for those curious: I am not switching because I have a problem with MovableType. I merely switched because I’d heard good things about WordPress and wanted to try it out. So if you’re looking for validation of one being better than the other, you won’t find it here!

Also, there were a couple tricks to migrating everything over. They were:

• FeedBurner migration issues using the FeedSmith plugin
• FeedBurner wouldn’t accept my new RSS feed
• Preserving links from the old MovableType system

FeedSmith Woes

The first problem was switching my FeedBurner account over. WordPress has a plugin called FeedSmith that is supposed to make it trivial, but it wasn’t actually redirecting my RSS feed like I expected. It turns out I had to change my permalink settings and then the change took place. So that tripped me up a bit.

It was also not clear from the FeedSmith/WordPress integration documentation how the plugin works. I finally figured out, through some trial and error, that it basically redirects the RSS URLs in WordPress (ie: /feed/) to the specified FeedBurner URL for all requests EXCEPT for those from FeedBurner, which of course is required to avoid circular logic.

FeedBurner choking on my RSS feed

Once I figured out what the plugin was supposed to do, I then tried to configure FeedBurner to point to my new WordPress installation. I had already imported my MovableType content, which worked perfectly. However, FeedBurner would not accept the new URL and instead was complaining that there was an invalid UTF-8 character.

It turns out that one of my posts from MovableType had a special character that was giving FeedBurner some grief once it had been moved to WordPress. I figured out which one it was with trial and error: I simply changed my WordPress settings to have 1, 2, 3, etc posts in the RSS feed until FeedBurner started complaining about the feed. Then I just deleted that feed as a quick fix.

Preserving MovableType links

Once I had everything else done, i wanted to preserve my old MovableType links so that search results and blog entries wouldn’t be broken. Fortunately there were two articles I found that greatly assisted with this process. The second link was especially useful, though I had to do a few things differently.

• Importing from MovableType to WordPress
• From MT to WP: Using the Same Permalinks as Movable Type

The first step was to get get the original MovableType directories to have a wildcard redirect (I believe using mod_rewrite, but my ISP did this part) such that /my_mt_blog/* redirected to /my_wp_blog/* where the wildcard pattern was preserved. For example, this URL:

http://blogs.opensymphony.com/plightbo/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html

Redirects to this:

http://lightbody.net/blog/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html

Once that was done, then I needed to configure WordPress to use the “Month + Name” permalink settings, with a small modification: I needed to use “.html” as the postfix instead of “/” like WordPress defaults to.

At this point, just about everything was working except for two final problems:

• MovableType links used underscores (”_”) in the URL whereas WordPress uses dashes (”-”)
• MovableType links are truncated to 30 characters whereas WordPress do not appear to have such a restriction

In the blog post I referenced, there was a tip to use the Underscore Plugin for WordPress along with a special mySQL statement to truncate the post names. I found I could skip the plugin and just run the following:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,30);
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,29) WHERE post_name LIKE '%-';
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = REPLACE(post_name, '-', '_');

This truncates the imported posts to 30 characters and, for those that ended in a space or special character, to 29. It also replaces dashes with underscores. The end result is that my imported posts have the same URL as they had in MovableType. That’s it!

Next week in Mountain View, CA, we’ll be hosting the world’s first Selenium Users Meetup. If you’re in the area and are even remotely interested in development methodologies, QA, or automation, come on by. The event is on Monday, February 25 from 6:30PM to 9:00PM. You can find out more here

I can’t believe it’s been over 8 years since I first went from “open source user” to “open source developer”, but it was all the way back in 1999 when I released OSWorkflow, which was based on my work at Cisco Systems developing a document management system, to the open source world. It was designed to be a simple, easy-to-use workflow system based on the principles of the “finite state machine”.

While it was considered lower level than other competing business process solutions, it actually got quite a bit of traction due to it’s simplicity and the fact that instead of using big “businessy” terms that other offerings used to describe themselves, it never hid what it was: a core finite state machine engine designed to make it easy to manage the workflow of many entities (people, issues, documents, etc).

Since then, OSWorkflow has been a pretty good success: a GUI for creating workflows was built, the development team evolved beyond just me (in fact, I haven’t been involved in the project directly for 5+ years), became the core of the super-popular JIRA issue tracker, and now it has it’s own book.

As the original creator of OSWorkflow, I was given a copy of the book and read through it the other day. In addition to the tremendous pride at seeing the contents in print, I was actually surprised to learn many new things about OSWorkflow. The book covers topics such as complex branching, rules engine integration, Spring integration (Spring didn’t exist back when I used OSWorkflow!), and even tie in to those complex business process solutions I never quite “got”.

Overall, the book is an excellent guide to OSWorkflow and building workflow systems in Java in general. You can learn more about it here and buy it from Amazon here.

Moving multiple files in subversion

Sure, count me in for voting for Java 6 on OSX. Not sure what 13949712720901ForOSX is? I’m not quite sure either. Google it.

Looks like the new Spaces feature in Leopard doesn’t work with some Java apps, including IntelliJ. Specifically, you can drag the window to various spaces, but when you click on the icon in the dock, the screen doesn’t automatically navigate to the correct space.

My guess is that this has to do with the way IntelliJ creates the Swing-based windows it displays. Spaces probably is keying in on some hidden window and so it doesn’t know where it should take you.

On the other hand, most apps properly support spaces just fine, even when multiple windows are open in different spaces. For example, Safari windows in two different spaces will simply cause spaces to alternate between the two windows every time you click on the Safari icon in the doc.

Here’s to hoping Jetbrains fixes this soon…