Welcome to Smuggle Me

Today I was notified that Chase users can get $100 off the Amazon Kindle. Here’s the message:

Thanks to Chase, your readers may be eligible to receive $100 off the regular Kindle price. Amazon.com’s revolutionary wireless reading device now has more than 160,000 books plus top newspapers and blogs available and is more affordable than ever with this limited time offer from Chase.

I’m sure this is a way for Chase to be able to get more people using them, but what’s Amazon doing? Is Amazon helping to subsidize the cost of Kindle so that it can sell other Amazon products? Either way, if you’ve been looking at a Kindle and use Chase, then this deal is worth taking a look at.

One of the nice things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates and changes that enhance the blogging platform. One of the bad things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates. That means you have to go and update all of your blogs. Which in my case is far too many. Take a look at the list of blogs that I maintain:

Blogs
Smuggle Me
EMR and HIPAA
Lynn Family Blog
Something for Nothing
Fundraising
BYU Sports
Spoil On

Pure TV Network Blogs
TV Freaks
Dancing with the Stars
So You Think You Can Dance
Fringe
Amazing Race
AGT
TV Sports

Other People’s Blogs
Crowdsource This
True Life Relationships
Take Flight Blog

Blogs I Don’t Write To Anymore, But Don’t Want to Take Down Yet
Cambrian House
miaMessage Blog

Ok, so I’m too lazy to link all of them. A bunch of them are new blogs since I’m splitting Something for Nothing into a TV Blog network. So far it’s doing pretty good, but it’s a good thing that I’m not blogging all of them myself. I have 4 other people helping me to update them with content.

Now if I can just automate the Wordpress update we’ll be all good. At least I’ve standardized the plugins I used so I don’t have to test nearly as much.

I don’t know why Wordpress doesn’t just link to this OPML link file from the link manager, but since they don’t it’s sometimes a pain in the butt to find. So, just go to http://www.example-domain.com/wp-links-opml.php to export the list of links from Wordpress

There you go. Now you can export the links from wordpress just as easy as you can import them.

I’ve searched high and low for a way to move just one blog category from an existing blog into a new blog. I found tons of ways and great documentation on how to move an entire blog to a new domain, but I couldn’t find anything that showed how to take one Wordpress blog category and create a new blog using that category.

I found an old plugin/import that should have done the job, but hadn’t been kept updated with the latest version of Wordpress and so it didn’t work for me. I also found a ton of people on the Wordpress forums interested in doing the same thing, but no one offering an answer. The best they could offer was importing just the RSS feed for that category. Problem there is that then you lose all the comments, categories and tags for those posts. Comments being the real kicker for me.

Therefore, I decided to go it alone and figure out a way to do it using the only option given in the Wordpress Export which was the user that created the post. My goal was:
-Export All the posts, categories, comments, tags for just one category of my blog
-Create a list of those posts that I could use to redirect traffic/google to the new location

There might be easier ways (and hopefully they’ll make this an option in the Import), but this worked for me. Also, I wouldn’t try this method unless you’re pretty good at find and replace, executing SQL queries and editing themes.

Overview of Process:
*Export Blog to Test Server
*Change Theme to Get list of Blog Post IDs/Posts for Category
*Change Author of Each Post ID to a new author
*Export posts for new author
*Import into new blog
*Create list of 301 Redirects on old blog
*Clean Up new blog DB

Read more…

Ted Murphy, founder of IZEA recently launched a personal microblog. If you are part of the IZEA family or a fan or rockstartup this is your chance to interact with Ted. You can check out the site here.

I was the 61st member of PayPerPost when I joined 3 years ago. You can imagine that over the 3 years Ted, myself and PayPerPost (now IZEA) have been through so many interesting experiences. While I’m not nearly as active in IZEA now, I still follow them and am interested in what their doing. Ted’s one of the most creative people I know so it will be interesting to see what Ted does with his blog and if he’ll have the time to do much.

My wife and kids are out of town this weekend and so a friend from work invited me to go to Borders to listen to a UNLV student play some acoustic guitar. The guy had some pretty amazing stuff. You could tell it came pretty natural to him. I guess he’s the president of the Guitar Society of Las Vegas. Looks like a pretty cool group to be apart of. So, if any of my readers play guitar in Las Vegas, get in touch with them.

I must admit that I think the best part of the night was hearing Katrina Leshan play a bunch of songs that she wrote herself. My friend from work and I guessed how old she was and just couldn’t believe it when we found out she was 17. She’d written something like 3 songs just this week. One of which she just wrote today and played for us. Talk about some amazing talent. You can check her and her music out on Katrina Leshan’s myspace page. One day when she’s a famous singer you can say you heard about her first here.

My favorite song she sang was the first one she sang that I think she called “Chances.” Once she puts it on YouTube I’ll post it on my blog. I wish that I could have heard it again. I think one of the future Guitar Society of Las Vegas gigs I’ll have to get a babysitter and take my wife to enjoy some nice guitar.

Katrina Leshan also sang a modified version of a song she calls “…you and we should totally go bowling and eat some suuuuuuuper cheesy nachos (AKA See You) (AKA The Song I Wrote For Brandon Walsvick)” Here’s a rather poorly recorded video of the song on YouTube. Much better in person, but still amazing to watch this video and think that she’s only 17.

All in all, a nice way to spend a Saturday evening with good company and good music.

I think the image pretty much speaks for itself. One of the funniest images I’ve seen in a while. I love the relationship one.

In the past years I’ve always been able to find a nice stream of Versus that allowed me to stream the Tour de France online without any problem. This year I have yet to find a nice stream except for the free one that Versus offers for the first 2 stages at a very ungodly hour in the morning.

This year, it looks like Justin.tv is going to save us with the EuroSport Live stream of the Tour de France. I love that it also archives the race so that if you aren’t there live you can watch the race after the fact too. Granted, you have to put up with the english commentary, but essentially that’s what Versus has with Phil Ligget too. I actually prefer the english commentary since it’s a quite refreshing perspective.

I am just a little bummed about even watching this year’s Tour de France since they kicked off Levi Leipheimer and Alberto Contador and their entire team. Just doesn’t seem right. However, I’m sure I won’t worry too much once I see a crazy sprint or a tough mountain stage. I’m just a little sad that there are only 4 Americans participating. That’s really unfortunate that there’s so few.

About 5 years ago I was having a discussion with my brother who told me that he wanted a service that would just send him a short part of a book to his email. He always read his email and by having it in his email he’d be compelled to take the time to read it. More specifically he wanted to have a short part of The Book of Mormon sent to his email so that he could follow the prophet’s counsel to read The Book of Mormon daily.

Well, my brother doesn’t need to look any farther. Turns out there is a service that will do this for you. I also love that it has an RSS feed of it too. Might as well get my scripture reading done with my other feed reading. The only challenge there is that I’ve been letting my feed reading go by the way side lately. So, maybe I should stick to email.

Today Techcrunch announced that Facebook just passed up MySpace as the largest social network. I think we all knew that this was inevitable. MySpace sucks and Facebook sucks much less.

The worst part of it all is that MySpace is still going to be around for a long time to come. In fact, last I checked it was still growing quite rapidly. MySpace is to social networking what AOL was to dial up. We’re getting really close to the end of AOL, but I’m afraid that we may not see the end of MySpace. Let’s just hope I can keep my children away from it.

Congratulations Facebook.