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Degradation on the job

I remember a conversation with my father-in-law. We were discussing the transition of my freelancing work into an employment. We spoke about the salary and benefits in the contract. He asked, if I had included a surcharge for being on a permanent task. I asked him to explain. And here is the bottom line.

Photo from Death to Stock photos http://deathtothestockphoto.com/

We (in this industry) are knowledge workers. This is a much overly used phrase. It boils down to that our value as an employee or freelancer depends on our knowledge, be it explicit or tacit. If we are hired for a certain position, we need to keep at it. There are several possibilities how we can do that. Going to conferences, taking a training, meet colleagues etc. This needs time. And sometimes money. All this expenditure has to be accounted for. By you or by your employer. He may support you with money or free time or he may not (which is common in Germany). If not the salary has to compensate for your personal investment. So why has he to do that?

Because his order to work on a certain task or field for a (supposedly) very long time distracts you from acquiring additional knowledge. If you would still be freelancing, hopping from gig to gig you would to some extent learn new things. And you would invest some of your time and / or money in getting new things to know. Since you are your own boss.

If you work on a defined focussed task for a longer time, you will be left behind on your fields of expertise. This once was the reason you were hired. After some years, your worth as a coworker will degrade. And this is the reason good employers care for your knowledge.

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How to merge two WordPress blogs

Introduction and Overview

For some of you it might be pretty obvious how to do that. But for some of my readers this might be a new topic. So here is a short overview of how to do it:

  1. Test if it works:
    1. Prequisite: you’ll need a locally running web server with PHP support. If you don’t have one, you could try to test the merge on a second web server, but alas that’s out of the scope of this posting.
    2. Download the destination blog and install it locally.
    3. Install the WordPress Command Line Tool.
    4. Download all articles from the source blog as XML file.
    5. Install the WordPress Import plugin.
    6. Try to import the XML file.
  2. If all works well, repeat that (without step 3 since the URLs are ok for production) in the production instance of the destination blog.

Local test

Download destination blog

First we need a download of the blog, where all postings should be merged together. This means:

  • Zip or tar the whole WordPress directory together, get it down to your machine.
  • Install it as a virtual host on your local web server.
  • Get a full export of your WordPress database.

My WordPress directory was called “www” and resided in /opt/sites/de/technologyscout (that’s how all my web server document roots  are organized /opt/sites/TLD/DOMAIN/SUBDOMAIN). So I downloaded it to my laptop, moved it to /opt/sites (yes, I maintain that also locally) and renamed it to “techscout”.

If you’re like me, it’s a good idea, to look up the database credentials in WORDPRESSROOT/wp-config.php:

define('DB_NAME', 'xxxxx');

define('DB_USER', 'yyyyy');

define('DB_PASSWORD', 'zzzzz');

I also like to have exactly the same credetials locally, so at the MySQL command line I do:

grant all on xxxxx.* to yyyyy@localhost identified by 'zzzzz';

flush privileges;

Then I import the downloaded WordPress database with:

mysql -uyyyyy -pzzzzz xxxxx < database.sql

 

Install WordPress Command Line Tool

Since WordPress has a habit of saving absolute URLs in the database, which is btw. a very bad and stupid habit, we need to patch those URLs to work locally. This is done with the indispensable wp-cli tool:

wp search-replace 'http://www.technologyscout.de' 'http://techscout'

This will replace every occurrence of http://www.technologyscout.de with http://techscout. Now please try to log in with your credentials. Everything should work locally now. Please have a look at the URL in your browser after login. If you see the productive URL (for me http://www.technologyscout.de) this means the search and replace didn’t work as expected.

Download XML archive with all postings

Please go to Tools -> Export in the admin and select “Posts”. You’ll see additional options. I selected:

  • Categories: All
  • Authors: All
  • Start date, End date: Nothing, just go with –Select–
  • Status: All (You can only import published posts, if you like)

Now click on “Download Export File” and save the file locally.

Install WordPress Import plugin

Now please go to Tools -> Import inside the admin panel. You will see a list of options similar to this one:

Importoptions

Please select the last entry called “WordPress” (who could guess that, right?). If you didn’t have the WordPress import plugin installed WordPress will ask you if you would like to do so right now. We certainly want to. After installing the plugin, we are ready to …

Import the WordPress XML file

Proceed by selecting the input file we just downloaded. Everything should work smoothly. The imported postings should be sorted according to their original date into the database.

Do it in production

It’s a good idea to get a database backup of your production destination database before importing the blog posts. Then go to Tools -> Import, install the import plugin if needed, and import the XML file we already used locally.

That’s all. Have fun!

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Blogumzug – Blog move

Deutsch

Hallo, vielleicht wundern Sie sich, daß Sie auf dieser Seite landen, obwohl Sie die deutsche Version sehen wollten. Ich habe festgestellt, daß es auf Dauer eher unsinnig ist, zwei Blogs mit ähnlichen Inhalten zu verwalten und habe daher die beiden Blogs zusammen gelegt. Die Inhalte von technologyscout.de finden Sie jetzt auch hier auf der Seite.

English

Hi, you might wonder why you got here instead of seeing the german version you expected. I realized, that it is a bit of a hassle to support two blogs with very similar content, so I merged them. So now you can find the content from technologyscout.de in here.