Jan 08
Guess what? Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, my favourite presenter at NFJS, has just bought a MacBook Pro! I always think that Dr. Venkat should be a kind of guy using a Mac instead of a Dell Lattitude ever since I saw him at the symposium last year. Now he finally did it. Guess we will see more Macs at this year’s NFJS. Although it doesn’t seem that they have it scheduled for Calgary yet. Not good. 
The link to Dr. Venkat’s blog entry seems to have some problem. It shows you a blank page when you click it. If you are using Firefox, just go to the address bar and press ‘Enter’. If you are using IE, use Firefox instead.
Jan 01
I didn’t expect it to be a difficult task. Well, it wasn’t very difficult to do in Ruby. But it was annoying. Not because of Typo or Ruby, but because of Blogger’s crappy API and limited functionality. The following is the steps that I had to go through to make it work:
- Migrate my old Blogger account to the new one because the old one uses Blogger’s Atom 0.3 API, which is a piece of junk. It doesn’t have the creation date of the post. Therefore it’s impossible to preserve the time when the posts are created. The new Google Data API, on the other hand, has a lot more meta information in it.
- Change the Allow Blog Feed option in Blogger settings to Full. You can only specify Short or Full but not both for this setting. If you select Short, you can only get the summary in the feed.
- Now comes the most annoying part. Blogger doesn’t support Markdown so it outputs straight HTML in its feed! Some of the HTML tags caused casting of method parameters to fail when I posted to Typo using metaWeblog API. It took quite a few gsub() to replace those tags with Markdown.
In the end, I was able to migrate all the posts successfully. So Vlad, are you ready to move to Typo now?
