Blog

Here is something I wouldn’t have expected: I managed to use my iPhone (with the WordPress App) to retrieve my last 10 posts. After I lost all my previous 2 1/2 years posts I was trying to decide if I should “re-blog” some of the older posts or just skip it and move on. I fired up the iPhone WP app yesterday, and it could not connect to the server (I had changed my password – and it’s a good thing too).  That’s when I noticed the last 10 posts were cached on my iPhone and because WP could not connect to the server to retrieve or update posts they were all just sitting there.  If I hadn’t of changed my password on the server WP would have connected and wiped out all the locally cached posts (because they were all gone off the server) – and, yes, I did test this after I had all the posts off the phone.  I updated my password and *bam* all the local cached posts were cleared and my last (and only) post was downloaded.

It turns out that WP for iPhone can be configured to cache 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 of your last blog posts. By default it is set to 10 and I had never changed it. Not that anyone should ever use this as a backup method (it’s a pain), but I thought I’d at least share how I got my last 10 posts back.  Please note: I have since fixed my backup scrips, so unless I lose the whole VPS or the drives I won’t be experiencing a WordPress database loss again.  However, since I have set my cached posts in WP app to 50 :-)

Getting the 10 posts back wasn’t hard – just tedious.

• I opened WP app
• Selected the post I wanted to save
• Double-tapped on a word in the post
• Tapped on “Select All” on the pop-up menu of iPhone 3.x
• Tapped on “Copy” on the following pop-up menu
• Pressed the home button
• Selected the “Notes” app
• Tapped ‘+’ to add a new note
• Double-tapped in the note and selected “Paste”
• Tapped “Done”

Did that 10 times, to get all the posts into Notes.  Then performed a sync with my MacBookPro and all the notes showed up in Mail.  Then it was just a matter of copy/pasting the html from the note to WordPress, fixing the publish time, setting the tags and categories (WP app for iPhone had that information too – I just looked at it on my phone and reentered it).  Since I still had the directory structure on the server and did not lose any files in the file system (only the WordPress database), all the links to photos and images still work just perfectly – that was nice.

Now I really have only two more things I need to do:

1. Galleries didn’t come back – there are no html links in the post to a gallery – they are just WP tags (like [ gallery order=”title” ]) and the gallery information was stored in the database.  So I have some posts with no galleries now, and I need to look at how to recreate the gallery information because all the photographs are still in the same place.
2. Since I store all my images/photographs for this blog by date,  I might go back and find images and galleries that were posted in the last 2 years and create blog entries for them and add a short piece of summary text. We’ll see how much time I have.

I was originally going to use Evernote to get to posts off my iPhone and back to my server.  I had, in fact, performed that whole process outlined above saving the text in Evernote, only to discover after I was done that Evernote has, what I consider a severe flaw.  It recognized all the links to images in the text as real hyper-links (well they are).  Apparently Evernote doesn’t allow rich text like that on the iPhone and it now refuses to sync (Syncronization failed. Unknown Error u11) – that’s helpful.  Currently, my Evernote for iPhone won’t sync *anything* – I did a Google search and found that Evernote has problems with hypertext on the iPhone.  I imagine when I delete those notes from my iPhone, it will once again sync with the sky (or the cloud), but currently, it’s raining.

Note: I love Evernote – I use it for a lot of things.  I’ll continue to use it.  Failing to sync because there is a hyper-link in the note – that’s inexcusable.