cre8d design

Is this the best way to promote a new feature to a non-technical audience? This appears on our local television network’s website:

I click on the link to download it and I’m overwhelmed by the information which follows (I’ve bolded a few terms):

TVNZ Headlines Widget is a free desktop headlines watcher.

Note: TVNZ Headlines Widget is currently only available for Windows PCs and requires Windows 2000 or XP or later.
Look for more free TVNZ Widgets out soon.”

I find the word “widget” to be vague and an off-putting term; unless you’re a Mac user or a techy-type person. Is that just me – do you like the word widget and find it a useful term?

I’m also not sure why they didn’t just link straight to their widget on the Yahoo site here, rather than forcing people to navigate and search through the site. The description of the widget on the Yahoo site is as follows:

TVNZ Headlines Widget is an RSS feed reader for articles published on tvnz.co.nz – the website of New Zealand’s public broadcaster. This Widget lets you link through to the latest headlines from dozens of News, Sport, TV ONE and TV2 categories. The Widget also allows you to search the tvnz.co.nz website for articles and videos of news, sport, and your favourite programmes.

According to Pew Internet Research in 2005, only 9% of online Americans had a good understanding of what the term “RSS feeds” – they’re not talked about much here in New Zealand so I would be inclined to think that it would also be understood by only a minority of people still.

In order to get this thing working, you’ll have to install the Yahoo Widget Engine and then the TVNZ headline widget. Is it worth the trouble?

There’s been 515 downloads in the last 6 days so people are definitely interested – but I wonder if more would if the barrier to entry wasn’t so high or technical?

I’ve tried various widgets in the past and have ended up removing them all. They’re like gimmicks to me, and I end up switching back to bloglines to monitor my favourite sites, the little Windows clock in the bottom right to check the time and notepad++ to manage little notes.

How would I promote a new “widget”? Here’s a first stab at it:

“Live TVNZ headlines right on your desktop – for free!”

For instructions, something as simple as the following could work (with linked instructions on how to install the programs):

1. Download and install the “Yahoo! Widget Engine” first here.
2. Then install the live TVNZ headlines program here.

Wordpress offers a simple way to import content from many other blogging systems (details here) but what happens when your system isn’t listed there? Moving from one system to another isn’t necessarily a nightmare – especially if all your data is already in a database. I recently moved a lot of content over from a system called XOOPS to Wordpress. I had a hunt around to see if anyone else had done this and think I found a couple of perl scripts but they weren’t applicable to what I was wanting to do and I wanted to feel comfortable importing in the content.

The only thing I wanted to bring across from XOOPS were all the stories – these would be turned into Wordpress blog posts. It’s a very simple case because there is only one author, one category and no comments on the XOOPS content.

I had a look at how XOOPS was storing this content in the database using phpMyAdmin and compared this to how Wordpress stores its blog posts and matched up the XOOPS table fields with the Wordpress ones where possible.

Note:

1. The content in this case was all written by one person so I didn’t need to worry about the author id but XOOPS stores this as uid. If there were a number of authors, the author data could be exported and imported into Wordpress too.
2. The content wasn’t categorised (it’s organised by date only) so I didn’t need to worry about categories but this could be exported and imported too.
3. XOOPS and Wordpress store their dates differently so I had to do a quick conversion between formats. The “+43200″ is the difference between New Zealand time and GMT.

Once this table matching had been done, this was converted into a MySQL statement:

SELECT storyid AS ID, 1 AS post_author, FROM_UNIXTIME( published ) AS post_date, FROM_UNIXTIME( published +43200 ) AS post_date_gmt, bodytext AS post_content, title AS post_title, 0 AS post_category, hometext AS post_excerpt, 'publish' AS post_status, 'closed' AS comment_status, 'closed' AS ping_status, '' AS post_password, storyid AS post_name, '' AS to_ping, '' AS pinged, FROM_UNIXTIME( published ) AS post_modified, FROM_UNIXTIME( published +43200 ) AS post_modified_gmt, '' AS post_content_filtered, "" AS post_parent, '' AS guid, '' AS menu_order, "" AS post_type, '' AS post_mime_type, 0 AS comment_count FROM `xoops_stories`

The resulting data was then imported into Wordpress.

Again, this was a nice and simple example because there were no comments on the entries so only one table was being exported from XOOPS. If you already have posts in Wordpress, you’ll need to be more careful about the IDs not conflicting with older entries as well. Since this was a new Wordpress install, I didn’t have this problem.

I also needed to update Wordpress’ post2cat by importing this data into it:

SELECT "" as rel_id, storyid AS post_id, 1 as category_id FROM `xoops_stories`

This matches up categories with the posts.

If you need to move from one system to another and there’s no automated convertor, it can often be quite simple to figure out what to do to convert.

One of the most fantastic kiwi TV shows of recent years, Outrageous Fortune has a brand new site.

What more fun could you ask for: setting up a site for something which you love?

The script writers have written a blog in the style of one of the characters, Loretta and it’s hilarious if you know what’s going on in the show. Season two premiered tonight and it’s looking to be a brilliant one at that.

The style of the site is very much in theme with the show and there’s more features to come over time.