Inside the Mind of Suz

I have definitely been slacking in my post game lately. You know how it is when summer kicks into full gear, right? No? Oh well. I tried!

Anyway, I do plan on making regular posts again. I realized it’s been a hot minute since I posted anything of substance on here, so I thought I’d post to let everyone know I’m not dead and I’ll be back to normal sooner than you think!

One of the first things I’m going to do is change the theme here. I’ve really grown tired of this one and really only wanted it because it gave me the winter option. There are some other thoughts I feel like sharing, and those will come.

I’m on Week 8 of my own c25k podcasts and the homestretch is near! I feel good and can’t wait to run my 5k next month!

Just wanted to check in!

I’ve been having problems with Google Reader lately as it’s not showing accurate unread items. I usually have 100+ new items when I log in. I just pulled up my GR account and it said I had 9 new items. This has been going on for a couple of weeks.

I know I have more than 9 new stories. To prove my point, I went to my “Music” folder and clicked on my feed for “Black Eyed Peas News from Google”. After a couple of seconds it pulled up 8 new items; items that were not included in the initial count.

Isn’t the point of Google Reader to tell me how many stories I need to read, and from which subscriptions? If I have to go through each one in order to get it to “check”, then I may as well just perform the news search myself — or visit the site — and skip using Google Reader?

I thought it was an issue with my computer, but I pulled up my GR account on my RSS app of choice, Feeds, and I get the same inaccurate unread count. What’s really good, Google?

In any case, I’m quite frustrated as I have a lot of subscriptions and GR is completely messing up my workflow with these recent errors. I’m not sure if they changed their code or what, but I’m not pleased. What used to be a very good system for me is now broken and I’m beginning to look elsewhere.

Here is a visual example using my Google News feed for Miss Candace Parker.

I see new items, but Google says there are none.

I’m going to try to set up a new account, using a different email, and see if that changes anything. If not, it’s na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey hey hey….GOODBYE to Google Reader.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a handly little WordPress plugin which allowed me to convert a CuteNews installation to WordPress. I tested it out on an older site I have and it worked ok. I really just wanted everything switched over and that happened. All the posts and categories were intact. That was good.

The bad part is that all the HTML was completely stripped from all the posts. EVERYTHING! If I linked to an outside article, it was gone. If I wrote a multi-paragraph update, the formatting was taken out and it appeared as one big blob of a post. Not a good look. If I embedded pictures or a thumbnail in the post, that was no longer in there either. I’ve also read that only the CN “short-story” gets transferred over, and not the full entry. That’s not good for me either. Basically, if you used CuteNews as a text-only news script, using Other-Ext-WP is perfect.

However, I have another website that uses CuteNews. I’ve had it for nearly 5 years and it provides a lot of news and media updates. Having the HTML stripped out of it is not an option. I am dying for a way to have all of that content converted over to WordPress ASAP. I’ve Googled and taken a look around the web trying to find a solution. Nothing I’ve tried has worked.

So, if anyone knows a step-by-step guide to migrate a blog from CuteNews to WordPress or a person who knows how to do this task, please, please, please let me know! I’m even willing to pay. I just don’t want to lose all my hard work or spend a ridiculous amount of time “fixing” all the posts. 5 years of work is a lot!

Someone really should develop a tool or something. I mean, they could make a killing because there are a lot of people, like me, who are desperate to switch, but just don’t want to lose all of their work!