Since two days ago, a lot has happened in my life…I’m honestly glad I didn’t have to contend with work.

Conglomeration of Items

Blog Conversion

I was able to successfully change the converted blog entries to mostly point to my current server for photos rather than the Blogger servers.  I realize I still have links to older blog posts that point to Blogger and I there were a few instances of the conversion that didn’t work so the photo either still points to Blogger or doesn’t appear at all.  I will be fixing them manually and gradually, so if you see a problem in an historical blog post, feel free to let me know.

In case any techies are interested or someone is doing a similar conversion of their blog from Blogger to WordPress, here are the steps and the Search and Replace statements I used to convert over 1,000 photos:

1.  I went to the Google/Blogger Photo Archive page for all the photos I uploaded over the years through blogger and downloaded them to a folder on my computer.
2. After turning off the WordPress Setting for storing Media in Month/Year folders (Settings > Media > Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders), I loaded thousands of downloaded photos into my main Media Upload folder.
3. I performed a complete back up of my blog ( I use a plugin call Updraft to do that).
4. Finally, I did a mass update of the HTML code that presents this blog to have posts point to the correct Media photo instead of the Blogger photo…here are the Search and Replace terms I used in PHP Admin (checking off Regular Expressions when I did it):

• Search – <a.*bp.blogpot.com.*s[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]?/(.*.jpg).*(width=”.*” height=”.*”).*/a>
• Replace – <a href=”https://queerjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/\1″><img class=”aligncenter wp-image-9677 size-medium” src=”https://queerjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/\1″ alt=”” \2 /></a>
• Search – <a.*bp.blogpot.com.*s[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]?/(.*.gif).*/a>
• Replace – <a href=”https://queerjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/\1″><img class=”aligncenter wp-image-9677 size-medium” src=”https://queerjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/\1″ alt=”” /></a>
• Finally, I did a Search/Replace (without regular expressions) for any code for hyphens (%2B) or parentheses (%2528 and %2529) in Blogger references and replaced them with – or ( or )

Just a caution, this isn’t easy, so if you’re not comfortable with HTLM, PHP Admin or some of the other more technical areas of web pages, I wouldn’t recommend trying it.

Election

I was overalled glad with the result of the election yesterday because we will now have oversight of the White House and some level of checks and balances.  There were some disappointments in my local area and there was one big Senate election in Texas that still confounds me…but overall, we did well enough.

Current Knitting

I was able to finish the Spring Garden Stole and it’s much nicer than I expected (although photos may not show it off very well).

It turned out to be about 7′ long! and it’s about 18″ wide…It’s incredibly soft and the colors aren’t too “muddied” in the final fabric.  It’s got a great drape to it…it’s got just the right weight/heft to it for a draped fabric.  Overall, I’m quite happy with it.