Blogger to Wordpress Migration - Step by Step Tutorial

I often see the Blogger domain of this blog and have a sinking feeling that I am stuck with this blogspot sub-domain. Believe me, there is nothing wrong in running your blog on a blogspot sub domain. There are instances of blogging successes on a blogspot domain too. It is just that with a custom domain and paid hosting, you have more flexibility and control over the various elements that comprise your blog. And for SEO benefits, it is advised to always run your blog on a custom domain - preferably using a blogging software like Wordpress - though Drupal would also make a good fit.

Today, I stumbled upon a very useful article written by Amit Agarwal which explains how to migrate your blog from blogger to paid Wordpress hosting and your own custom domain. What is relevant about this article is, Amit explains how to do the migration without losing any of the visitors to your old blog hosted on blogspot domain.

Check out Amit's article to learn how to do the search engine friendly switch of your blog from Blogger to Wordpress platform without losing any link juice.

Introducing a new installation wiki in the neighbourhood

If you ask me to start naming some content management system, I can start with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and so on and then will not know when to stop. Seriously, there are innumerable content management or blogging systems around. Someone told me that he started counting the blogging tools available in order to get an idea in numbers and he was still counting when he reached the number 200.

Now add to this backend programs such as databases and web servers which play a pivotal role in the working of CMSes and we have a whole lot of software on our hands. Keeping this huge mountain of software in mind, Packt Book publishers who are on the forefront in publishing books related to CMSes (they publish books related to other subjects too) has rolled out a new Wiki called InstallationWiki.org which caters to explaining how to install most of these software on your machine either locally or remotely. It has divided the tutorials into 8 broad categories namely "Open Source", "Content management systems", "Web development", Databases, Java, PHP, "Microsoft and .NET" and finally "Networking and telephony".

Already there are a growing number of tutorials and howtos mostly related to CMSes on this site. But considering that this is a Wiki, which anyone can edit, this project shows a lot of promise. Also one should keep in mind that the tutorials listed on the Wiki bear the seal of approval of Packt Books thus one can expect to find quality articles on this site. Do check out the article on PHPMyAdmin for instance to know what I mean... In the past, I have reviewed a couple of Packt books such as the one on Oscommerce ,IPCOP, Wordpress, Drupal and so on and I have found each of them to contain very useful information.

Building a bittorrent box

Ross explains how to setup a bittorrent box which remotely downloads the files and serves it to ones local machine. This quite exhaustive article explores how to do it using a combination of a headless PC (ie a computer without a monitor) running Ubuntu, OpenSSH (openssh-server), a vnc server (tightvnc-server) , a VPN client, Samba and of course a bittorrent client.

The bittorrent client he has used to download the files to his headless server from the internet is Azureus which is a java based client and so I suppose you also have to install Java runtime environment in Ubuntu.

He also explains how to setup autofs to configure the machine so that drives or partitions can be mounted on the fly by Ubuntu when you try to connect to that partition from your laptop or another machine on your network.

As to why he has written this tutorial, this is what he has to say (and I quote) ...

While most of our time on the Internet is spent IM’ing, e-mail, or just browsing the Web, you may run in to situations when you need to do some powerful file transfers. If you use a laptop, you’re use to getting up, suspending your laptop, and running out the door all of the time. But, sometimes you know you just need something dedicated to get work done. You’ll need a solution to retrieve files and serve data when you need it.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set a small headless Ubuntu server used to retrieve BitTorrent files, while even saving them to a external USB hard drive that can be disconnected on the go. You even discover how to remotely administer your server from the Web using SSH, VNC, and an inuitive HTML UI, while being able to retrieve files while you’re away from home.

This tutorial takes for granted you have a spare computer laying around. Building a computer is out of the scope of this article.

Do read this very informative article written by Ross to understand how to build a bittorrent box.

Beginner MySQL, PHP and Perl tutorials in pictures

Inpics - short for In Pictures is a website with a difference. While most websites provide tutorials and howtos which are quite verbose, Inpics takes a different path to teach the basics of technology related subjects. It explains things in pictures. And indeed, a picture is worth a 1000 words. The pictures are simple black and white photos.

They have a growing collection of tutorials which are quite easy for beginners. Inpics began as part of a research study conducted for the U.S. Department of Education. The goal was to make it easier for people with learning disabilities to grasp computer subjects.

As part of the study, they created simple, illustration-based tutorials. Everyone who tested them—not just people with learning disabilities— are claimed to have said the new tutorials enabled them to learn faster and easier than conventional text-heavy books.

For the Linux enthusiast, they have a couple of tutorials on MySQL,PHP and Perl which are quite refreshing to follow. Do check them out.

Create a Linux Desktop application In 14 minutes flat using QDevelop and Qt

Who said creating gui applications for Linux were difficult, tedious and mind numbing ? Ok, perhaps this was true 10 years back or so. But now Linux has a plethora of tools which make it possible to create GUI applications - I dare say as easily as programming in Visual Basic for Windows.

You can literally drag'n'drop, move and resize all the widgets such as buttons, text areas, radio buttons and so on and design a very good GUI in minutes. And in the forefront of ease of use is QDevelop which acts as a visual integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Qt applications for Linux.

Clive a 54 year old programmer who has over 25 years of developing experience walks one through the nuts and bolts of creating a GUI application from scratch. What is really interesting is that he uses QDevelop to design the application and also walks one through the steps involved in installing Qt & QDevelop, the different layouts in Qt as well as the final finished product. A very informative tutorial targeted at beginners.

TrueCrypt Tutorial: Truly Portable Data Encryption

TrueCrypt is one of the many disk encryption tools available in Linux and other Unices. Some of the features of truecrypt are as follows (and I quote):

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
• Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive.
• Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
• Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
  
  1. Hidden volume (steganography).
  2. No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).
• Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: LRW.
  

Lipiec at Polishlinux.org has written a very good tutorial which explains how to setup and use truecrypt in Linux. He explains right from the start which is - download the code, compile, and install it to creating encryption volumes. Just so you know, truecrypt has been made available in deb and rpm formats as well. So if you are using one of the major Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora, you can skip the compilation from source step.

Truecrypt is available for Linux and Windows but the developers have provided a easy to use GUI only for Windows platform. Linux users are still made to depend on the command line to setup and manage encrypted volumes using truecrypt.

FFmpeg tutorial - Develop a video application in less than 1000 lines of code

FFmpeg is a library which can be used to build applications that record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

The FFmpeg toolkit consists of a number of programs them being :

• ffmpeg - which can be used to convert one video format to another. Say you want to convert a YouTube video in flv format to mpeg format, this tool will help you convert it.
• ffserver - This is a HTTP server which can be used to stream audio and video across the web.
• ffplay - is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
• libavcodec - a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developped from scratch to ensure best performances and high code reusability and ...
  
• libavformat - which is a library containing parsers and generators for all common audio/video formats.
  

I came across this excellent tutorial on Ffmpeg where the author demonstrates how to develop a video player in less than 1000 lines of code. Just so you know, one of the prerequisites of understanding the tutorial is some knowledge of the C language.

While on the subject of videos, you may also be interested in the different ways of creating screencasts in Linux.