VIRB° BLOG

Just imported from my wordpress, deleted the duplicates, and it went great! Quick & Smooth.

Oops! Doesn't like (ordered or unordered) lists, or proper punctuation — converted using SmartyPants.

http://virb.com/sean/blog/20030

Thanks! Great feature!

Coupe hiccups for me: (I'm trying to decipher if it's a problem with my Wordpress feed or with Virb):

1. The date is weird. Saying Dec. 31st, 1969 for all posts. 2. Quotes are getting lost/converted to weird symbols. I don't *think* this is my feed, but it may very well be. (I'm using a WP plugin that converts everything to "norma" before posting, so the symbols should be reading properly. 3. My posts are getting truncated/shortened even though my settings in Wordpress are to allow the full post. (and the full post shows up elsewhere via RSS.)

Thanks again.

Will there be ping support, to let the Virb robots know it's time to go fishing for a new post?

The "View Original Post" is great to have in there, so kudos on that. Synchronization is becoming bigger than ever, so having this new import feature is really awesome. Previous/Next post links would be cool, though.

Sean- I'm having the same issue with punctuation being converted. I don't have SmartyPants installed, but Wordpress has its own "Texturize" filter that achieves a similar effect. It also seems to convert a Wordpress formatted ellipse (…) into an ampersand (&). I don't have any entries with lists to test right now..

We are aware of the issues with some styling with HTML elements within the blogs as well as special characters being turned into boxes. We're working on this now.

Also, your new posts should be picked up within a day of posting them.

In Firefox 3.0a4pre on your Blog back end page, the "DELETE" button appears slightly over the upper-right portion of your display photo. In Opera 9.2 the button doesn't show up at all. It's fine in IE6/IE7for Windows XP (one button for each blog post along the right hand side). I can't find my USB drive to test in FF2. Anyone else confirm?

Page in question: http://virb.com/backend/USER_NAME/blogs

Also, are the RSS feeds hosted on Virb working? Every one I click comes up blank. For example: http://virb.com/rss/mikebranski/blog

Never mind my RSS Feed question; Chrys answered it while I was typing :)

It seems like those characters are also breaking the outgoing RSS feeds. Thanks!

My posts imported fine (except for the special characters showing up as boxes), but then after editing and saving one of the imported posts the post date was changed to Dec 31, 1969.

awesome

Had the same problems with formatting, and the post date thing. I'm don't think I'll be using this feature anyway, but thought I'd let you know about the problems I came across. :)

If your RSS feed does not provide a date, it becomes Dec 31, 1969 — the beginning of the epoch.

Amazing! Thanks guys.

Just one (minor) observation: some of my imported posts include YouTube embedded videos; when I open them from my profile, nothing show up but the title. It would be really cool if the post could embed the video…

The thing with the date was that only a couple of the posts were dated 1969, like 2 out of 7, the others were ok (all from the same feed from a wordpress blog).

please tell me this works with stupid, unfriendly myspace. i tried, and it says the blog was imported successfully, but i see no entries… :(

Yes, I'm definitely excited for this!

Woot, thanks be to our Virb overlords!

I'm also getting weird issues with the WordPress import. On top of the square box character issue (which is being fixed I read), there are some other character encoding issues. Also, the picture(s) that were imported block some of the buttons on the right. I personally don't mind, but thought I'd bring it up – sort of like a QA crowdsourcing.

Brandon- I took a look at your blog, and the images are blocking the buttons on the right because, while they worked for your person site's layout, they're too wide for your Virb blog.

I don't know if Virb blog styles can be changed, but a simple CSS rule of overflow:hidden; to the container should do the trick (that would clip the images are the edge of the blog) Or you can resize any images that appear within an entry by giving a generic img selector a width using percentages %'s.

HTH (Maybe in the future Virb will implement something to uniformly scale any blog images that are wider than the width of the blog?)

Awesome! Glad we got it! Ok, so on to the issues, all the embedded stuff seems to be messed up for me, mainly images, I use blogger as my blog, and all the images show up in the rss feed (http://destroythebeautiful.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) so Im assuming that its something on your end. Thanks again for adding the new feature(s) keep em coming

Aehm … how to delate a blog post?

it's a great feature, but it's a bit buggy for me. it seems to reformat myspace blog posts badly, and for some reason i couldn't get it to import posts from the feed on my website which is a wordpress blog – feed://http//tintinnabuli.net/disaster/?feed=rss2 from http://tintinnabuli.net/disaster/

any thoughts?

i would love to use this feature if i could get it working for me…

Just linked to Livejournal and it seems to work great. Have deleted duplicate posts.

I do have one other issue though not linked to the blog feed – would it be possible to have the same control over displayed groups on the profile page as there is with friends? Or is it there already and I've missed it. The last few groups I've joined keep showing up, whereas I'd like to mix them around more. I haven't used advanced customization because I'm not up on all that stuff (though I wish I was, there are some great pages here at Virb).

Great feature… too bad it doesn't support Chinese :(

I keep getting this error when importing either my RSS or Atom feed:

"PC Load Letter?! This RSS feed does not appear to be valid."

My feed url is: feed://jtylercity.net/rss/

Any ideas?

@JT try changing 'feed' to 'http'.

I'm having the punctuation problems and list problems as well, but awesome for getting this feature going so quickly!

looks like you do not allow any language except english in imported blog posts. this is really bad :( i really hope you'll have this sorted out sooner or later.

The only bug I see right now (and that has been mentioned) is character truncation. Conjunction junction, what's your fuuuunction. …..

Spiffy, but I have two blogs and I can only import one. Can we do some aggregation or something?

Feeds prepended by 'feed://' should work just fine now. Also, feed items with no title are now acceptable.

Still cracking down on funky characters. Thanks for the feedback!

Loving the Import feature…now, can we use this type of feature to add a module for importing other RSS feeds? Such as, Del.icio.us Links, Netflix Queue? Digg.com dugg articles?..

there should be the ability to import multiple blogs as I have a personal blog and a design blog and would like both of these on my profile..

I can't seem to get mine in there… Here's my feed: feed://www.teamyacht.com/atom.xml

I've tried with both feed: and http:

Any ideas?

Jona,

I ran your feed through the Feed validator, and it does not validate:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.teamyacht.com%2Fatom.xml

Nice job on cleaning up the odd (square) characters! Can I humbly submit a request that lists be styled? :)

Sean,

We're working on getting the blog styles cleaned up. Thanks!

Livejournal worked great! I do echo the above comments on importing more than one blog, though… as I have more than one that gets updated. Other than that, lovelovelove this feature!

I actually would like to keep my personal blog and my Virb blog separate, at least for now, but it's certainly nice to have the option…

Along those lines, I don't know if this is the place to say so, but I'd LOVE to have the ability to post to my Virb blog via external apps like Firefox's Scribefire extension or BloGTK on Linux, etc. Any plans for an API?

i second what brad2.0 said- i'm really really wanting to be able to import other rss feeds too: del.icio.us, my google reader feeds, etc. i'm guessing we're waiting for the kinks to be worked out on this before that happens….

also, as i said in a previous comment, i'd really like the ability to indicate on the profile page display of my blog whether there are any comments on each post and a show a "comment here" link. any chance of that happening? being able to choose how the date it was posted is displayed would be nice, too.

can somebody tell me if those things are a possibility? thanks

Leesa, you should go to the Virb group "Suggestions" and mention that you'd like to see support for importing other mediums like del.icio.us, etc. That way it'll get more attention, because it'll just get looked over here because of all the other comments.

Oh, and a side note: Can you guys set up the blog so that when a Virb/UMI employee leaves a comment, it's differentiated? Makes it easier to see right away if you guys have replied to our comments. =)

Awesome! But images without a full path should get the rest of the url prepended. Bloglines does this fine for example.

Example of a post with broken images:

http://virb.com/marcovhv/blog/23515

Hello … how can I delate blogposts? :(

For those trying to delete blog posts, go to Your Home and navigate to Blogs, or use the URL

http://www.virb.com/backend/USER_NAME/blogs.

As far as I know, the Delete button for blogs shows up in FireFox 2, and Internet Explorer 6 & 7. It does NOT show up in Firefox 3.0a4pre or Opera 9.2.

**CAUTION** **The below workaround for deleting individual blog posts does NOT give you a confirmation message before it deletes it; you get no second chance by doing it this way. I STRONGLY recommend waiting until the Delete button is fixed in all browsers. If you can't wait, then read on…but you have been warned.**

If you can't use a browser that shows the buttons, you can delete a blog by typing

http://www.virb.com/backend/USER_NAME/blogs/delete/XXXXX

where USER_NAME is your Virb URL and XXXXX is the blog post ID (you can find this by viewing your post and copying the string of numbers at the end of the URL) You could also just click on a Blog post from Your Home->Blogs and put /delete after /blogs and before /XXXXX (the blog ID number) so it looks like the example URL above.

HTH, Mike

Sweet baby jesus, this is the feature I've been waiting for!

someone mentioned above that the special character problem was fixed. Just reporting in that mine are still not. Importing from Wordpress.

The special character issue is still happening in the titles of my imported posts (apostrophes ( ' ) are showing up as question marks ( ? )), but the body text issue has been resolved.

I'm also having problems with apostrophes turning into question marks. Also for me, blockquotes in body text don't show up after they're imported; and even after I add them back in myself, they don't display properly. (I imported from a Wordpress blog.)

The import function doesn't seem to work that well with other languages than English. Are you working for a fix for that? The posts get cut off when the first non-english character appears.

Cheers!

I was able to import my blog no problem- very excited about this… my only suggestions are ones I have seen a few others make as well… 1.) i would really like to be able to keep my virb blog seperate from my external blog 2.) it would be cool to be able to import more than one blog. other than that though, it seems to be working pretty well for me. :)

worked great for me. I love it.

BUG: The importer skips my Icelandic characters :///

Just a note — we've still got a few more character issues to fix. I assure you we're on it! :)

I imported my blog.com blog (http://bamboosong.blog.com) but it has not added any other posts since I have imported updated. No bigey, but it'd be cool if it did it more frequently than just once… Thanks, I love virb!!

After numerous weeks of posting on 7 different communities and websites, you guys made it a lot easier for me! Big thumbs up!!!

Just imported my blog… spotlesssss 8) Greaaaat feature!

That's why we love VIRB!!!

Is there any way to let non-Virbies comment on my Virb blog? That's the one feature I really, really need.

I've cut off my RSS feed from Live Journal because strange coding was turning up in place of apostrophes etc. Also, a cedilla in an original LJ post actually cut off a blog in mid post. So I'm back to cutting and pasting. The original imported posts were never affected. It seemed to be a more recent problem.

Hi! The blog I'm trying to import is in Spanish, and I have problems with special characters: it cuts the message when founds an accent mark added to a letter. Have tried to import directly from Wordpress and FeedBurner, but doesn't work in any way. Great job with Virb, anyway!

Just send a comment here an hours ago and can't see it. I'm going to try again… the thing is that Virb can't display my Wordpress RSS: every time it finds an accent it breaks… Could it be because of the encoding used for pages and feeds? I use UTF-8 in my Wordpress site. Thanks!

Ok, I'm late, I know. I like that feature but it doesn't work as said above for feeds in other languages than English. Any idea if it will be solved and when?

I am trying to import my Myspace blog. It says it has been imported successfully but I don't see any posts. My feed is:

http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=89981903

Help would be appreciated