Every time it hits the 60 second execution time limit, leaving me with half the content. This always happens when it’s importing revisions and I don’t care too much for them. So I’ll just skip them. The fix is pretty simple.

Open wp-admin/import/wordpress.php and around line 420, add following patch:

    if ( !$post_id or is_wp_error($post_id) )
        return $post_id;
    }
+   else if ($post_type == 'revision') {
+       printf(__('Skipping revision <em>%s</em>...'), stripslashes($post_title)); 
+       return;
+   }
    else {
        printf(__('Importing post <em>%s</em>...'), stripslashes($post_title));
        $comment_post_ID = $post_id = wp_insert_post($postdata);

Then I ran into an issue where orphaned post meta entries were created which is a known issue. I initially just bailed out from the function but there is a better fix.

So, around line 390, add this:

    if ( $post_exists ) {
        echo '<li>';
        printf(__('Post <em>%s</em> already exists.'), stripslashes($post_title));
+       $post_id = $post_exists;
    } else {

Now the import will go through all the way to the end.

All the software does is synchronize ~/Dropbox with your online storage. You get about 2Gb for free which is more than sufficient for what I need.

Lesson learned, I won’t run into this problem again. I have cron spawning a script every hour or so which compares the file with the previous version and drops a fresh copy in ~/Dropbox if it changed.

Then I started thinking, what about backing up wordpress sites this way. I don’t exactly care for the SQL dumps. Installing wordpress from scratch is easy and fast enough. I do care about the content, more specifically about the WXR dumps but I don’t have any desire to go in there every day and do a manual dump. Getting to those dumps from the outside turns out to be pretty easy. Just put a file with something like this in the toplevel directory of your blog:

    <?php
          include 'wp-config.php';
          include ABSPATH . '/wp-admin/includes/export.php';
          export_wp();

Done! Simple isn’t it? The XML is streamed to standard out which means you can call this with a webbrowser.

Automating everything

Make sure you give the file a hard to guess name. Kind of sucks to see an exact copy of your content show up somewhere else, doesn’t it? I used a random string, pulled that through md5sum and tacked .php onto that. Try guessing that

Then, to actually execute it automatically add this to your crontab

  wget -O - http://example.com/hardtoguessfilename.php 
       | gzip - > ~/Dropbox/dump.gz

The dump will be automatically synchronized within seconds and you have something less to worry about.

I became rather frustrated with the pre-election campaigns.  I’m not used to the kind of spam and nonsense each candidate is stuffing down the throats of their voters.

They put your mailbox full with crap and call you at home.  Or run a parade through your street at 8am in the morning.  Big speakers screaming their candidate’s number mixed with samba.

Glad we got that behind us.

Anyway, enough rambling. To tell you the truth, I was actually quite impressed. Voting closed at 17:00. The news at 19:00 reported 73% of the votes in Belo Horizonte already had been counted. 70% nationally. 2 hours is pretty damned fast.

By midnight the results will be in and when I wake up tomorrow morning someone will probably already have cleaned the mess in our street.

The mess created when I voted last time back home still hasn’t been cleaned up.

So here it is, JeffryDegrande.com.  It’s a boy, weighs 19 plugins and has blue eyes.

No, seriously, I want to burn my feed and I need a post for that.  I promise I’ll noindex it