I mostly finished work on the painting based on the Johnny Cash song “Tiger Whitehead”… At the urging of many people, I’ll set up an online store for both originals and prints hopefully in the next month. I need to get a charger for my good camera so I can take shots that accurately capture the pictures. You can click this to jump to I Need More Life where there’s a high res photo.
Also, a few people had written me asking me to do tattoo designs for them. I forgot who wrote me (sorry), so if you’re still interested, please drop me a line and I’ll get drawing.
Other than that, it rained a lot last night and everything is in bloom and very pretty…
So because she outgrew her last bike — a 12″ bike that was a present from my neighbor, as his youngest had outgrown it also — we built a new bike (15″ I think) for Nefarious. It’s a pretty pink bike (of course), and has every kid’s favorite accessory, a PA and siren. We biked all the way around the pond at the park, and then some more at home… Very fun!
I’ve finally gotten around to finishing off my utility that converts IAM pages to RSS feeds (which can then be imported into nearly any CMS — I used it to convert my IAM page into a WordPress blog), as well as doing bulk renaming and thumbnailing of images into a search-engine friendly format. It also includes a utility that lets you go through your entries one by one and choose which ones should be included manually. Note that both are command line tools so don’t bother unless you’re comfortable with that. First of all, here are the links to download the data from your IAM page:
https://iam.bmezine.com/iamback.exe – This link downloads the text of your IAM page. The format of the file is fairly obvious, and you can edit it in a text editor if you’d like to do things like search and replace functions on it (for example, to convert links to an IAM friend’s page to a link to their non-IAM blog).
ReduceIAM.exe goes through your IAM page’s diary dump’s entries, one by one, and lets you choose what entries to include. You’ll be asked the following initial questions.
“Location of IAM diary dump INPUT”
Enter the complete location (ie. “c:\directory\file.txt”) of the diary file that you saved with the first link above.
“Location of IAM diary dump OUTPUT”
As above, but this is the name of the text file that the output will be written to. It will be identical in format to the downloaded diary dump, but without the entries you ignore.
“Location of incoming image directory”
Enter just the directory name (ie. “c:\directory\images\”) where you uncompressed the file you downloaded in the second link.
The program will simply go through the entries one by one, displaying their content and images (all of them, without processing them or cleaning them up) in your default browser. Hit “y” to keep the entry and “n” to skip it. This is a pretty raw utility and you can’t undo or go back, and you have to do the whole thing at once.
iam2rss.exe is the utility that does the actual conversion. When you run it, it’ll ask you for the diary dump file and the incoming image directory (as able), as well as:
“Output directory for RSS files”
This is the directory that all of the RSS files will be written to. They’ll be cut at about half a meg, so if your diary is very large, there will be more than one.
“Output directory for image files”
This is the directory that the renamed files and their thumbnails will be written to. They’ll be placed in subdirectories in the format YYYY/MM (year/month) rather than dumping them all in a single directory.
“Enter date range to include”
This allows you to specify a date range, or just leave it blank to do all of it.
“Remote Location of images (prefix)”
This specifies where you plan on hosting the images, so that the links to them are correct. For example, on my Zentastic blog they’re in “https://zentastic.me/iamimport/”, so I had to upload all of the contents of the local image directory (ie. “output directory for image files”) there.
“Thumbnail size”
This specifies how large (at most) the thumbnails will be along their largest size. The default is 80.
After that, you’re asked whether you want to include entries that use the BLIST1, BLIST2, IAMONLY, ADULT, YOUTH, and other USER directives in your output or not. Finally, you’re asked whether you want to include IAM-internal links or not. If you do, they’ll be all be fixed to make sure they work (ie. if you link to “/?glider” it’ll fix it so it’s “https://iam.bmezine.com/?glider”). If you don’t, the links will be removed completely.
Then the program runs. It’s quite fast so it should only take a moment if everything works as expected! Then you just have to upload the images to your new webhost and import the RSS files… If you have any problems making it work feel free to write me at snowrail@gmail.com.
I long ago got rid of my real guns (a Para-Ordnance 45, a post-ban Uzi, and an FN) but I got a new BB gun last week and have been having lots of fun shooting tin cans in my garage… Best $19.99 I ever spent.
PS. Zentastic will be back soon, I'm just converting it to a new CMS.
