Net-times: My Perspective

After years of being a Blackberry user my jealousy of not having any “apps” to play with finally took over.  Actually, let me back up about a year first.  In my house I don’t get great reception with Verizon.  Outside in the front or back and I’m fine, but inside the house coverage stinks.  One too many business dropped calls later and I called Verizon to see what could be done.  After all, I’ve been with them since the mid-late 90′s, so it was worth having a discussion.

Well, the person on the phone recommended a “network extender” to enhance the signal in my house.  I said great, when can you send one out to me?  The answer was as soon as I could shell out $200+ for this little piece of hardware.  This did not make me happy at all and I eventually was so angry that I went over to AT&T wireless for the first time in my life.  Well, the relationship with AT&T was rocky from the start and ended with me saying some not so nice things to a CS person (sorry about that).

This altercation pushed me into the new world of smartphones and I ordered my first one…a Droid and went back to Verizon Wireless.  I wanted this phone because of the optional hard keyboard and the Google Android platform.  Not having this was my biggest fear at the time.  Anyway, I loved the phone.  It was amazing and I didn’t even use the hard keyboard.

At the time my Dad showed some interest in having one of these smartphones, so I made a deal with him.  I’d give him my Droid at a big discount and I could get a new Droid X.

Back to present day:  I’ve had the Droid X for about one month now and it’s pretty cool.  The size is nice…much bigger than the Droid and BB, but great for visuals on screen and clicking text links.  The camera is a HUGE improvement over the Droid.  If a good camera is important to you, don’t even bother with the Droid…it’s terrible.  Only in very specific lighting was I able to get good shots in.  The Droid X has 8 megapixels and you can really see the difference in quality.  I bought the car mount and a hard case for carrying also, which I highly recommend.

However, there are a few issues that have been bugging me about the phone.  For one, I have not been able to upgrade to Android 2.2.  There are some great enhancements there and I’ve  been waiting for a while (with no end in site).  If it’s coming soon I’d never know since I have no information about the release date.  The second thing that bugs me is the HDMI capabilities that are promoted so much.  I actually went out and bought the multimedia station and extra HDMI cable thinking I would be downloading HD movies to my phone and watching them on the TV.  That’s not going to happen anytime soon since there are no good apps/providers for HD content for download and display via the HDMI/TV.  Netflix doesn’t have an Android app yet and Blockbuster…well, stinks.  I could download a movie from Blockbuster, but I could only play it on the phone, not transfer it to the TV for viewing…weak.

One other thing I think needs a major upgrade is the “Car” mode and music management.  The Car mode is a great c0ncept, but listening to media in that mode is too basic.  There’s very little functionality, which is probably good for car mode but needs something more.  Music management for me on the phone is to use Itunes then drag and drop the media onto my phone.  This is ok, but will only work for so long.

Well, let me just wrap up by saying I love the phone…Droid X.  However, I’m also looking forward to some enhancements (oh, did I forget about the upgrade to gmail mobile, which is desperately needed?).  I highly recommend it from an old Blackberry user’s perspective!

Kevin

A few weeks ago I received an email from the Google Blogger folks that they will no longer support the ftp version beginning sometime in March.  Unfortunately I had 4 Blogger services running.  While I was a little bothered by this abandonment, I wanted to move over to a better platform anyway.  WordPress was the most appealing choice.

I needed a little advice on migrating and I posted the question on LinkedIn.  The generous responses were quick and concise.  It turns out that WordPress has an import feature…awesome!  I was excited to get moving, but this domain was hosted on a friend’s server which was a bit bare bones, without all the bells and whistles you get from new hosting services.  It has been there for about 10 or more years, but I needed more control.  So, I setup an account with a new hosting provider and moved my files over.  Then we changed the dns and all was ready to begin.

The new hosting provider made it easy to install WordPress.  A couple of clicks and I was working in the admin.  I spend an hour or so looking for a theme I liked and voila, we were in business.  Moments later I find the import function in WP and that process began.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  I was able to make the connection to blogger, but received a generic message that “nothing was imported”.  Frustrated, I tried this a few different ways still with no luck.

I decided to manually pull the content and post them in the new app.  On this blog it was easy since there are only a few posts.  However, I have hundreds of posts on my other blogs and will NOT be copying everything over manually.  I will need to investigate an alternative that helps ease this process.

Once the content was uploaded I made some changes to the templates and added a few widgets and we were done…almost.  Now I had two blogs running with the same content and that would not be good.  My hosting provider offers a redirect function from control panel.  All I had to do was setup redirects for all the pages and we were done.  Well, the redirect function did not work either.  There might have just been a delay, but either way I was not seeing the results I expected.  That meant I needed to edit the .htaccess file and manually plug in each redirect.  This would include the actual post pages and any other page indexed by the search engines.  A little time consuming, but not a huge problem either.

I then added a few more pages and some ads and the job was complete.  Overall, it took about 10 hours to complete, including time spent choosing a theme/template and tweaking the layout.  Another 3 – 5 hours should be enough to make the additional changes I would like.  I’m happy with the results.

So there you have it.  A small blogger ftp account converted to WordPress manually.  Now I have to tackle the larger blogs!

Kevin