I’m a terrible blogger. I promise I will publish Halloween pictures soon. Expect the Devil and the Punk coming back!
But just in case you care: life is good and I’m doing fine.
Category Archives: This site
August update
Blogs turn very lame when you dont post regularly. Recently I haven’t had anything exciting to write about, so my blog has been falling into the lame category. This post is just to summarize some of the things I have been doing recently or that I’m going to be doing in the near future.
Party, party, party
After coming back from New York, I’ve been going out a lot in Austin. I have too much fun going out with friends and last night was the first friday in a loooong time that I stay at home, and it wasn’t even because I didn’t wanted to go out, but because I could not get my friends to join me and I decided to stay at home and take it easy.
Moving to a new group at National Instrumenst
After being in the Integration Services group at NI for almost 6 years, I’m going to be transitioning to the System Configuration Services group around September. I’m very excited about the transfer because I’m going to have new challenges and opportunities ahead. This group develops the ‘Measurement & Automation explorer’ application which helps users configure NI’s software and hardward among other services.
NIWeek starts next week and it means listening to great keynotes, having breakfast at Las Manitas, meeting with friends that work in other NI branches but come to Austin for NIWeek and in general being excited to be part of NI.
Wedding at Puerto Escondido
My friend Eva is getting married in Puerto Escondido, Mexico and I’m traveling there between August 15-19. Marcos is not sure if he can come because he is waiting for some paperwork related to his green card process. I hope he can make it though.
Social networks is something that has been arround for a few years. I have accounts in hi5, friendster, mySpace, LinkedIn and recently signed in for Facebook. My experience with FB has been amazing. The website is very well done usability wise. Very elegant and simple, but powerful. I already have lots of friend connections and its great to know what is going on with their lives. Social networks are not meant to replace physical human interaction, but to enrich it. I highly recommend that you give it a try.
Yes, I’m an idiot. I didn’t purschased my ACL wristband on time and now I’m going to have to wait for a last minute deal, hoping that someone can’t make it and wants to sell the wirstband to me. This year’s line up is amazing: Björk, Queens of the stone age, White Stripes, Killers, Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party, …
Soda Stereo one of my favorite rock bands in the world is doing a tour after their last tour ‘El Ultimo Concierto’ 10 years ago (1997). I’m going to see them live in Monterrey, Mexico on November 9th!
WordPress 2.0.1
Kuddos to the DreamHost team for creating a one-click process to update a WordPress installation.
It took me 5 minutes to upgrade my blog
Chichipanguanorrea ranks again #1 in Google for ‘daniel jaramillo’!
Almost a year ago I posted in this blog that if you search my name on Google, Chichipanguanorrea was the first hit.
Back then I was using HostRave as my host provider and SimplePHPBlog. I also mentioned that I wanted to add a counter to my website to monitor traffic. I installed BBClone and it works great. So far Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 has been visited by 5638 unique visitors.
Then I switched to a different host (DreamHost) and blog freamework (WordPress). When I did this, my website fell down from the top position of the Google ranking. The first hit (ranked 16th or something worse) was not even from my own site, but instead it was from Marcos’ blog.
I read once that one of the criterias for Google to rank a website, is by looking at how recent is the domain. If a domain is younger than 1 year, the site will have less weight. That kind of makes sense, because you should trust older websites more than new ones. But in my case, it wasn’t really a new website. It was an old website being moved to a new domain.
By the way, I just found this article that I could have used in the past: Switching to a New Domain Without Losing Your Google Rankings
Anyway, I was sad to see that I was no longer the coolest Daniel Jaramillo on the web! It really hurted my ego! 
But no worries people! Google has now put me back on #1!
Flickr integration
I decided to give Flickr a try and created an account and installed a WordPress plugin in my site to support it. I need to say that the integration was very easy and I like the results. I also installed a plugin to export my pictures directly from iPhoto to Flickr.
Flick has some constrains on free accounts:
- Only 20 MB can be uploaded each month
- Only 200 pictures will be hosted by Flickr. They say that after 200, you can still access your pictures, but I’m not sure if this works with WordPress.
I decided that I can live with those constrains if I use Flickr only to upload the pictures that I like the most. So let’s see how this new experiment of becoming a professional photographer works!
Chichipanguanorrea revamped!
After less than one year online, I decided to get serious with Chichipanguanorrea and give it a nicer home. I bought 2.4GB of space at DreamHost to host my site and I also bought the jllo.net domain. My idea is to host my brother’s, my mother’s and my dad’s sites as well, and also ask my sister and other relatives if they are interested on having their own web site.
Since now I have all the power of MySQL, I replaced my SimplePHPBlog system with WordPress.
All I had to do was generate an RSS from my old site and import it to the new one (see details below). I lost the comments on the posts, but I don’t care too much about that. I also had to fix some characters (vowels with tilde and ‘ñ’s) and remove an annoying CDATA section enclosing the posts. I also had to re-categorize the posts. But the whole process didn’t take more than 1 hour.
I also created a cool header with some of my hobbies represented in there.
Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 is juicer and prettier than ever!
Migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPressWhen I did this the versions were: SPHPBlog 0.4.0 and WP 1.5
I noticed that I got a few visits to my site from people looking on migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress, so I decided to give a more detailed explanation of the process. I hope I can remember all the steps since I did it a few months ago.
Change the preferences of the SimplePHPBlog, so it displays ALL the posts you have ever created in the main page, and not just the last 10 or 15. Then export your current SimplePHPBlog as an RSS document. From the main page of your SimplePHPBlog, right-click the ‘RSS 2.0′ orange icon (on the right sidebar) and select ‘Save Link as…’ and choose a file name like ‘my_old_site.xml’.
When I imported my blog I lost the categories and had to create them and assign them to the posts manually. I think that if you create the old categories in WP (use the same names. Is it case sensitive? not sure) before importing the RSS then WP will assign them properly during the import process. Let me know if you get this part to work.
Now import the RSS inside WordPress.
The sad part: you’ll loose all the comments inside the posts. I didn’t found an easy way of importing them. Oh well, life is never perfect…
And finally the ugly part:
The RSS generated by SimplePHPBlog, encloses the post body inside the <description> tag and adds a ![CDATA[...]] enclosure to it…
For example:
<description><![CDATA[This is the text of my post... blah blah blah...]]></description>
CDATA sections allow you to enclose text inside XML without having to worry about escaping XML special characters like <, >, ' or ".
But WordPress doesn’t remove the CDATA sections so you have to do it manually after you are done importing your XML. Yes, you have to do this on each post.
I also had to fix special characters like tildes (á, é, Ã, ó, ú) and Eñes, since I had some posts in spanish.
I’m thinking that a better option is to use a text editor and remove all the CDATA sections. Do a manual find/replace on the XML looking for <![CDATA[ and replacing it with blank text. Also replace ]]> with blank text.
Save the XML and open it with an XML parser to make sure it is still valid. Most browsers can parse XML.
If you succesfully tried this second option, leave a message here to let us know that it works.
Chichipanguanorrea 2.0 updated
Welcome to the new look of Chichipanguanorrea. I just installed the 4.0 version of SimplePHPBlog which comes with some new features:
- Calendar view for entries
- Contact Me form
- Block addition (see my new Photos block)
- Categories (now entries can be categorized)
- Stats (I'm still trying to get bbclone up and working)
- Entries rating
Enjoy your visit!
#1 rank in Google for Daniel Jaramillo!
If you search for 'Daniel Jaramillo' on Google, Chichipanguanorrea 2.0 shows as the #1 result!
I need to add a counter to monitor the traffic.
Photos added!
I did some research trying to find a good host to store my photos, since the space I have with HostRave is about 50MB. I found this one called Fotopic.net that gives you 250 MB of space and allows you to hot-link your pictures (which means anyone can see your pictures without signing up for anything). They have a really decent user interface to manage your collections and allow you to upload pictures through a web interface, FTP or even email. They also have a CGI API to manage your pictures, which I would like to figure out to dynamically create my picture links on the right of simple blog.
Right now there is only one collection and it only has a few pictures. I'll have a good set of albums pretty soon.
Chichipanguanorrea is back!!!
After a few months of pain, trying to find a good/reliable/flexible/powerful/free webhost, I finally found HostRave which only requirement was for you to have an email address from an internet provider in the US. I use RoadRunner from TimeWarner but I never configured an email account with them. Finally I did, and sent my application to HostRave… and you can guess the rest of the story, since you are reading this!
HostRave supports SimplePHPBlog. Sadly I couldn't upload the old Chichipanguanorrea site, because it creates in the content folder, some subfolders which are very long and contain numbers and symbols, and the UI for managing the site don't allow you to create those. Once the page is created, it does allows you to do it, but not manually. So I lost all the nice comments people left the day of my birthday. Anyway, it doesn't really matters now, the important thing is that Chichinea es back, and is here to stay!
- Daniel