Monthly Archives: June 2010

The Glass and The Inspiration

Photo Blogs

Over the last few weeks I’ve come across a great selection of photo blogs, whether their content be stunning imagery, useful tips or an eclectic mix of those and more.

This site from MSNBC was launched a few weeks ago, a tumble-log format photo blog updated a couple of times per day with the best press and sports photos they can find.

Pictory is a showcase of photographs, stories and infographics. I particularly enjoy the New York Series — featuring loads of real life imagery with real depth and nostalgia.

Photo by audrey le on pictory

I came across Lisa Bettany‘s work a few days ago, I especially love her series of shots on bad photography.

I noticed all the crummy photos I’ve taken over the last few years. After feeling mildly embarrassed, I realized how much I’ve actually learned about photography, simply from taking bad photos.

Do you have any favourite photo blogs? I’ve no intention of starting my own, but it’d be amazing to have the content and endeavour to do so.

Blog Move 1: Getting WordPress data to Ruby using XML

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Step 1 in the “Moving my blog” process is “Extract the current site’s data into a manageable format”

Frankly, that’s easy! WordPress has a functionality to export the site’s content to a single XML file containing all the published Categories, Tags, Posts, Pages and Comments. To do this (WordPress v2.9.2) click Tools > Export and save the file. In previous versions of the software I believe it’s under the Manage menu.

Wordpress XML Code: viewed in Dashcode, if you care.

I’m aware I could import the data directly from the WordPress database (to wherever it goes in the end) but let’s imagine we can’t. Anyway, database access would be tediously slow and inefficient to test against and implement.

A quick google for “import wordpress xml ruby” threw up nothing helpful so I turned to the Ruby XML libraries. John Nunemaker “feverishly posts everything he learns” at railstips.org and has two articles of use here:

The latter deals with three different ruby xml libraries and compares their speed, ease of use and how nice their names are to say. He puts REXML, hpricot and libxml-ruby. I’ll save you the pleasure of reading the article (if you like) and ccv John’s summary:

“Libxml is blisteringly fast, [but] Hpricot has cooler name, REXML and Hpricot both feel easier to use out of the box”

And there you go. Hpricot it is!

Now to get the data into Ruby. After a quick glance at the rubytips article and The RDocs I put together this code as a starting point:

cats_hierarchy={} (doc/"wp:category").each do |category| cat_name = category.at("wp:category_nicename").innerHTML cat_parent = category.at("wp:category_parent").innerHTML if cats_hierarchy.include? cat_parent cats_hierarchy[cat_parent] = cat_name else cats_hierarchy[cat_name] = [] end end cats = cats_hierarchy.to_a.flatten

That gives me two each to use Ruby objects each containing all of my category data: a hash which preserves the hierarchy of the structure and all the names in a linear array.

?> cats = cats_hierarchy.to_a.flatten.uniq => ["route66", nil, "rails", "american-2008", "reciprocal-affection", "hope-for-the-future", "code", "blog", "review-blog", "rant", "brands", "projects", "yab_shop", "textpattern", "meaningful-labor", "giants", "accessibility", "root", "charity-project", "apple", "xhtml", "america-2006-route-66", "ruby", "learning", "america-2007", "uncategorized", "iphone", "america-2008"] ?> cats_hierarchy => {"route66"=>nil, "rails"=>nil, "american-2008"=>nil, "reciprocal-affection"=>nil, "hope-for-the-future"=>nil, "code"=>nil, "blog"=>"review-blog", "rant"=>nil, "brands"=>nil, "projects"=>nil, "yab_shop"=>nil, "textpattern"=>nil, "meaningful-labor"=>nil, "giants"=>nil, "accessibility"=>nil, "root"=>nil, "charity-project"=>nil, "apple"=>nil, "xhtml"=>nil, "america-2006-route-66"=>nil, "ruby"=>nil, "learning"=>nil, "america-2007"=>nil, "uncategorized"=>nil, "iphone"=>nil, "america-2008"=>nil}

And so we have the starting point to getting this WordPress exported XML data into a Ruby application.

More soon.

I'm going to move my blog…