Blog Relations

Rockford’s Rock Opera is a site that has quite a bit in common with our own Storynory. It’s made in the UK and offers high quality audio stories for children. There are some differences – for example Storynory is totally free, while Rockford is “freemium” – (six episodes free, the rest paid for). But the dedication to children’s audio over the net is the same. A couple of years ago, we helped create Rockford’s iTunes feed. Yesterday I caught up with Rockford’s impresario, Matthew Sweetapple, in his club – the Union in Soho.

Matthew is a musician as well as a marketeer – and music is one of the big features of Rockford. We were talking about our early memories of music from – dare I say it – circa 1969. We both agreed very much that there is a big overlap between the music   that children and adults enjoy listening too. Too much children’s music is sing-along, clap-along – when actually there is no need to be patronising to kids.  The same goes for stories.  Everyone enjoys a good story, however old they are. While talking about this, we  discovered that we were born within 2 days of each other. Perhaps there is something in the stars after all.

Rockford has a message about maintaining animal and plant diversity, and Matthew has struck up alliances with good causes ranging from Battersea Dog’s Home to The World Wildlife Fund. Storynory doesn’t really campaign with a message. I see stories as an end in themselves.

One thing we discussed is having a Rockford page on Storynory. A couple of years ago, I didn’t feel we were quite established enough to carry third party material, and I was worried about diluting our brand. Now I think we can benefit from widening our offering. Rockford and Storynory seem like natural partners. So look out for Rockford on Storynory.

One of the things I love about Storynory, is the way that users from all over the world get in touch. Last year I had a message from Noorjahan in Afghanistan, asking for permission to translate our stories into a local language, Dari (Eastern Persian), for use in schools. Of course I agreed. More recently an instant message popped up from Noorjahan about her latest work. She has been traveling through North Eastern Afghanistan (Takhar and Badakhshaan) collecting women’s songs and formatting them into a booklet. She also has some recordings which I would love to hear.

I can’t give you the lyrics, because they are in the local language, but her English introduction to her book is fascinating. It gives a glimpse into rural life in this remote and troubled part of the world.

“In some houses women would sing with low voices to avoid informing the male family members who would have prevented them from singing. Some women made me promise that I wouldn’t tell any of their relative that they sung.

“Fearful whispers about the hardships women go through were common. For instance once I was invited to a friend’s house in Takhaar where about 20 women had gathered to sing, but as soon as one of young girls started singing everyone in the room started crying and the music stopped. Later, I learnt that the young girl was married to a violent elderly without her agreement.

“To enrich their songs, women use daira, chang and clapping. They use commonly known themes such as “Anar Anar Anare Naw Bare Man” with their own couplets. Most of these rhyming and rhythmic couplets are made on the moment and they carry a heavy weight of the thoughts of the singers. Even though Badkhashi women sung in Dari and women I met in Takhaar sung in Uzbeki, which I am not much familiar with, most of the songs were about the pain women go through in life, for example they emphasized on the relationship of mothers with their daughters.

“Daughters view their mothers as their shelter against the injustice they face from the male family member and as someone who has gone through the same pains, and sometimes mothers are looked upon as helpers of the fathers and brothers in their unfairness.

“Through their couplets for their mothers, directly and indirectly, young girls complain from the unfair traditions in their communities. Many Uzbeki and Dari couplets express women’s unhappiness in their marriages and about being away from their families after they marry and in most of these songs brothers and fathers are held responsible for the miseries women face.

“In most rural areas, even today, women sit around and take turns to sing with daira in weddings and other parties. Talks around water springs, tailor houses and cookie cooking ceremonies provide women with the opportunity to sing. In every village, there are a few young girls and women well known for their voices and skill of singing. These women are invited to weddings and they sometimes receive some money in exchange for their songs, but as the usage of cassettes and CDs become more common, women’s songs lose their value and listeners among the people. Even though this change in people’s musical taste and their interest to new musical styles might be a natural effect of globalization, but because the original music of these areas are not preserved a huge damage is done to the richness and diversity of music. Therefore; before we lose this beautiful and rich music of the country, musicologist must try to preserve them as a national heritage for humans.

Peace,
Noorjahan Akbar .”

Now Newsweek has picked up the story as part of its coverage of the elections in Afghanistan. From the article, I learned that Noorjahan is 18 years old and has spent two years at high school in America (hence her excellent English).

Effervescent and quotable,  Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress , lends a huge feel good factor to the occasion.   He wears a trilby hat and a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket.  He speaks with animated gestures and a twinkle in his eye.

He talks with enthusiasm about the next stage of WordPress – “Facebook in a box”.  WordPress will bundle its multi-blog platform (WordPress MU) into WordPress, and with that comes  the potential to  plug-in BuddyPress and transform a WordPress installation into a social media site. His aim is to “connect all the WordPresses together” via this ecosystem.   Anyone who contributes to WordPress – say a plugin – can be ranked by their peers.

Although he uses social networks like Facebook he says:

“I think it’s important that for anything that’s a big part of our lives, there’s also an open source alternative.”

There’s a potential problem with the current social networks:

“You don’t own the fruits of your labour into the service, their interests are not always aligned with yours, and even the ones that have been good in the past, are not necessary going to be as good in the future..”

He mentions communities using BuddyPress including boy scouts, churches, and down syndrome families. They might not necessarily want to be part of a bigger community like Facebook.  He adds that  you might also want to keep your social networks separate:

“Things you do in the bedroom, and things you do in public, and those might be two social networks that you don’t want to connect.”

He talks a little about the history of WordPress.  How in the past, if you wanted to change the title of your site, you had to hack the code. If you wanted to extend it, you had to copy and paste your plugin into a hacks file.

“I feel really old when I talk about this stuff”.

Making WordPress open to plugins has created a huge community of developers with 5000 plugins and 5000 themes. As a result we configure our own set-ups.

“We all have our own personal WordPress. None of us are using the same software… kind of cool, but also a big challenge.”

He wants to make sure that any upgraded plugin warns you if it’s going to break the system.  And now themes include more functionality they will have to be managed too.  But the trouble is this kind of automation is hard to implement.

“We had been talking about automatic upgrade for five years.  We needed someone who didn’t know how hard it would be to come in and do it. That’s the story of  WordPress. I didn’t know enough to know what was hard to do.”

The young founder – born in 1984 – has an eye on the future. He believes that its open source license is a “bill of rights” that helps to guarantee its future.  Even if Automattic – the developer of WordPress – goes bust, WordPress will continue to have a life of its own.

He feels more comfortable now than ever before that “WordPress will be around for a very long time, even after my involvement, even possibly my own mortality.”

I’ve just uploaded data from a spreadsheet with hundreds of posts into WordPress. It nearly drove me crazy in the process, but I think it saved time in the end. I could see this sort of data import being useful for something like an e-commerce site.

I have actually done this once before, but it didn’t seem any easier the second time.  If only for the sake of my own remembering, here’s how it’s done.

First of all you need to add a plug-in of sorts to WordPress. I say “of sorts” because it’s more of a hack than a plug in proper. Many thanks to Site 2nd for this though. You can download Site 2nd’s modified CSV Import Script here.

Site 2nd has modified this script from one by Zac Preble. You can read Zac’s instructions here. But you are also going to need a few Excel tricks. So here’s some full instructions. I hope they make sense to you.

First of all, upload the modified CSV Import Script into /wp-admin/import/  (NOT into your plugins folder).  Now in your WordPress admin , look under Tools, Import. You will see a lot of options for importing data including one that wasn’t there before – CSV, or Comma Separated (I’m not sure what the “V” is for !).

Now in Excel you need to prepare or modify your data.  You are going to need some columns. The first are going to be as follows:

wp_title   wp_post_date    wp_category   wp_content    wp_tags

If you need custom fields, you can add some columns on the end with any names you like Apples, Pears, Oranges, etc … these will be the keys for your custom fields.

Fill your data under these columns. If you are familiar with WordPress it should be fairly obvious what goes where. Just one thing. The date has to be in this format, and it has to contain a time.

2009/01/30 12:00:00

It’s a bit of a B***er but Excel doesn’t have an option to covert dates into the this format. I had to change them all by hand.

Tags should be comma separated. In the data I received, they were all under separate columns.  I had to create the tags under the wp_tag column by copying them from the other columns. I did this using an Excel formula. It’s like this:

=A2 &”,” & B2 &”,” & C2

Let’s break that down.

= means, well, equals. It tells Excel that this is a formula.

A2 is the first cell that I want to copy over into the column called wp_tags.

&”,” puts a comma after the first tag

& B2 copies over cell B2

Then, to make this formula work the whole way down the column called wp_tags, you have to grab the bottom right corner of the cell where you wrote the formula, and drag it all the way down. In the next row the cells A2 B2 C2 should be converted to A3 B3 C3 etc.

Now we are going to have to do something similar at the end so we can grab all our data and dump it into a text file with the extension CSV. This is the file that we will actually upload into WordPress.

I did this by creating a final column and copying all the other columns that I needed, over into it, and separating the data not with a comma, but with a Pipe | as per Zac’s instructions.

The formula I used looked like this:

=A2 &”|” & B2 &”|” & C2 &”|” & D2 &”|” & E2 &”|” & G2 &”|” & H2 &”|” & I2 &”|” & J2 &”|” & K2 &”|” & L2 &”|” & M2 &”|” & N2 &”|” & O2 &”|” & P2 &”|” & q2 &”|” & r2 &”|” &CHAR(10)

You should now recognise that the way to copy a cell is write:

A2

and for subsequent cells:

& B2

etc.

To add in a pipe separator write:

&”|”

At the end, you need to encode it all correctly for text with:

&CHAR(10)

Drag this formula all the way down the column as before. Now block and copy the whole column into a text file and save it with the extension .CSV. You will find that all your data is nicely dumped without any trace of spreadsheet formula. You just have a lot of data separated by pipes |.

You may fine some inverted commas in between the lines of your data entries. Just get rid of those with a quick search and replace in your text editor.

This isn’t all yet, though. Your CSV file needs a header. This will also be pipe separated and the same as in your spread sheet so it will begin

wp_title|wp_post_date|wp_category|wp_content|wp_tags|

And then have some more headings if you need custom fields

wp_title|wp_post_date|wp_category|wp_content|wp_tags|apples|pears|

Just put the header in first row of your text file above all the post entries.

Now you are ready to upload.  But just try this out the first time with a couple of entries. If it uploads incorrectly, you don’t want to spend an afternoon deleting hundreds of posts.   That’s when it gets really frustrating.

Go to WordPress, Tools, Import, CSV, and upload the file. The wheel should spin. It show the files it is uploading. It should wish you a nice day. You should then find the imported posts and see that all the data, including tags and categories has been entered correctly. I have to say, I didn’t get it right first time. Or second time,…. actually I lost count of how many times I tried. But I got there in the end. So it can be done. I hope you have swifter luck.