i’m reading dracula again at the moment and this time i remembered to mark a quote i’ve been meaning to note down, every time i’ve read the book, previously.

first off, as given on several legal advice websites, a description of the rights of bailiffs:

The bailiff cannot enter your house by force, but they can legally enter your property through open windows or unlocked doors, so make sure all your doors and windows are locked or closed!

Once the bailiff has been inside your house by entering peacefully, they can call again at a later date and enter your house without your permission, forcefully, to remove your goods.

and now, from dracula, dr. van helsing explains the limitations on a vampire’s freedom to enter the premises of his victims:

He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws- why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please

m’lud - i rest my case!

i did mention it in passing, in my post yesterday, but it really deserves a post of its own.

what an absolute steaming POS disqus is! - i’ve tried about half a dozen times now to migrate my comments from wordpress via blogger to tumblr, utilising disqus and its promise of making your comments acccessible from wherever you choose to lay your bloggin heid. i’ve spent literally hours, trying every possible combination of settings and ‘tools’ on the disqus site -all to no avail.  the closest i got to success was that some of my comments briefly appeared on some of my posts but, it was a fleeting moment of success and they soon disappeared again.

the frustration of wrestling with this crap is not helped by the fact that disqus’s own fecking tools dinnae even work;  their wordpress plugin bummed out with an error every time, after exporting a few comments - forcing me to manually import an XML file onto their hidden manual import page.  their migration ‘wizard’ [migration fuckwitt more like!] disnae work either and, as i said before, comments appear and disappear seemingly at random.

at the moment, when i log into disqus i can see all of my comments listed twice, but even this surfeit of uninformed opinion is not enough to register on the blog.  every post still has a stubborn ‘0 comments’ underneath.

well, i’m giving up now.

hopefully disqus will at least manage to do one thing right and manage my comments from now on, but it looks like the previous ones are lost in the blackhole that is the disqus API.  so, apologies to anyone who’s taken the time to comment in the past.

at least i now know why they chose the name disqus - after two days of wrestling with this crap, i feel like throwing it as far away from me as i possibly can!

in another futile attemp to kick some life back into this moribund blog, i have just spent the best part of the day importing bilge  -sook my stupid brain! blog from wordpress, self hosted on my server into tumblr. 

what a bleedin’ palaver, an’ no mistake guvnor!

for a start, there is no direct import from WP to tumblr, so you have to first export your WP blog to XML, then convert that to a blogger XML script, then set up a blogger blog and import the posts to that, then export them all again from blogger to tumblr.

as if that wasnae palaver-ish enough, if you want to at least make a futile attempt to preserve the comments from your WP blog, you have to sign up with disqus, intergrate that into your WP blog and then export your comments to disqus from WP. this is probably the most frustrating part of the whole process as disqus has got to be without doubt one of the most useless web applications i’ve ever come across in my life!

none of the abovementioned shenanigans is is officially supported by wordpress, blogger or tumblr –thanks guys!– but, thanks to some helpful third party scripts, it’s all ‘sort of’ doable [eventually!]

the whole procedure is explained by julioangelortiz in his post here.

it covers the basic steps and -with the exception of the comments system- i got there in the end, but i found a lot of the procedures needed multiple attempts and various tweakages to get it all working. a lot of this was doubtless due to the fact that my WP was self-hosted and i wanted to use the same domain name, when i moved it across to tumblr, so i had to do a lot of find > replace on the XML files to fix what would have been broken image links.

well, we’re up and running again now.  anything which is still broken is probably your fault.

now - will this change of scenery encourage me to kickstart the good ship bilge back into life again? that is the question.