This should log what is going on with automatic posting. Seems it doesn't create the log directory automatically, so the error wasn't getting logged.

Now with debugging enabled so I can see in the log where things are going wonky.

I fixed my typo, but posts are still not being received and published. I'll keep looking for the problem.

Looks like I had a typo in my authentication to The Kyle file. Trying again to get something posted from Talkabout.

I'm not sure what is going wrong, but posts here are not showing up on The Kyle File. Chyrp Lite is said to have a fully WordPress-compatible xml-rpc API, so I used Friendica's WordPress addon to send my posts, but The Kyle File is not getting the new posts. I'll have to play with this a bit more I guess, maybe check error logs and such. For now, this is a feature that I would like to have, but it's not what I really want, which would be blog posts being picked up by Talkabout and redistributed to my Twitter and maybe my Tumblr as well.

If I did this right, posts I put here on Talkabout should automatically post to my blog as well. It would be nice to be able to reverse it so that I can have blog posts sent to Talkabout, but this is a good start if it works.

@Friendica Support
I am the system administrator of the Friendica node at talkabout.cf, and have just updated the node to version 2022.10, along with a system upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 and an updated web control panel. I just received several email notifications that were garbled in my inbox. I was able to trace the problem to some header lines that have an extra space at the beginning of each line. I am including these redacted headers below. I also leave a couple of lines above and below intact to make these extra leading spaces visible.

Subject: [Friendica:Notify] Name Redacted tagged you (kyle@talkabout.cf)
Precedence: list
 X-Friendica-Host: talkabout.cf
 X-Friendica-Platform: Friendica
 X-Friendica-Version: 2022.10
 List-ID: <notification.talkabout.cf>
 List-Archive: <https://talkabout.cf/notifications/system>
 X-Friendica-Account: <kyle@talkabout.cf>
 References: <RedactedHexID@email.server>
 In-Reply-To: <RedactedHexID@email.server>
 From: Talkabout Federated Social Network | Powered by Friendica <notify@talkabout.cf>
 Reply-To: Talkabout Federated Social Network | Powered by Friendica <notify@talkabout.cf>
 MIME-Version: 1.0
 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="2-189687198-581818022=:18767"
Message-Id: <RedactedMessageIDSuppliedByServer@email.server>
From: "redacted@email.address" <notify@talkabout.cf>
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2022 14:33:24 +0100

The message ID of course is added by the mail transfer agent before the message is delivered, but I left that header because it is immediately above the Subject: header, which does not contain a leading space. I did resend the message by copying and pasting the garbled source message into a text editor, removing the leading space from each line and copying and pasting it back into a direct connection to my local SMTP server, sending the message to myself, and I received the correctly decoded message. Did I find a bug in the latest 2022.10 Friendica code, or did something go wrong with the upgrades that I performed prior to the update that somehow didn't affect anything other than these mail headers?

Several things. My showstopping like and comment problems have been fixed! It was simply a matter of permissions. Seems even admins don't get the permission to add or edit comments or like posts by default. Looks like guests may not even get permission to view pages by default. Checked those boxes and all is right as rain. And visitors who aren't registered get a simple math problem to solve before they can leave comments. This is excellent indeed!

Now for the archive issue. I thought my archive wasn't getting created properly after importing my WordPress xml. NOt so at all. I have the complete archive, and of course I already knew my blog would be searchable, so there is nothing to overlook until an update comes around, all is as expected, clean and simple.

My only real gripe at this point, and it's certainly not a showstopper by any stretch, is that I don't get an email notification when someone leaves a comment. Since I still do want to pass it through moderation for a review, just in case a bot somehow gets past the Maptcha plugin, it would be very helpful if I could see an email letting me know that someone left a comment so that I can take fairly quick action to let it through or to delete it. In any case, this comment system, although it's not threaded, really is not bad. As the administrator I was even able to give the admin group permission to edit comments, in case I want to shame the bot that put it there. Go me!

The conclusion: I have found my new blog software! It's simple, it's clean, the developers make it known right near the top of the website that they use W3C approved accessibility standards for screen reader users and others who need assistive technologies, and it's very flexible and customizable, even allowing for the choice of MySQL/MariaDB, Postgresql or Sqlite3 for the back-end database. This is so darn fast with SQLite3 that I don't think I'll be changing that initial choice I made. In any case, I will still likely export every week or so for backup purposes, as I do like having things in several places. But since my new hosting panel works as well as it does making backups, that may not be necessary either, though it's not at all a hard thing to do. Now to be sure I don't have any more problem posts to fix up from the old Tumblr and WordPress sites, and I can delete that wordpress.com account that I used to get my initial portable Tumblr backup as well.

Sadly it looks as though Chyrp Lite can't work for my blog either, and this is unrelated to my import from Tumblr into wordpress.com and subsequent export of my media and xml file from wordpress.com to my computer. There were some obvious problems with the import to wordpress.com, but those problem seem to be easy to fix; apparently either Tumblr or WordPress stripped source tags out of my HTML audio players, but those are trivial to add back into the xml feed. One problem I see with Chyrp Lite itself though. Although comments and likes are enabled, I can only see the number of comments and likes a post has, which tells me that all my imported posts have 0 comments and no likes yet, but I am not able to actually like a post or write a comment. It seems the buttons for those functions are hidden or malfunctioning, as I can't see them even when I set my view in Firefox to show no page styling. I can see JavaScript in the source of the page that should be allowing likes to be toggled and comments to be written, but nothing is being shown. As with all my other odd issues with various blogging software, my error log is again quite devoid of any explanation, or even so much as a hint that any error ever occurred. I did see that there is a link at the top of every page to email me. I was a little worried when I saw that, as I thought that bots may try to scrape me for nefarious purposes, but it does appear that my email address is obfuscated in the source of the page, so this shouldn't be a huge problem.

If not for the comment and like problem, Chyrp Lite would be my chosen blog software, as once I got everything imported, it really does look nice and feel snappy, even though it doesn't seem to be properly creating the archive from imported posts, but that is something else I can probably overlook for now. I can write in Markdown with no fuss and no difficulties whatsoever, no complicated blocks or any other fancy stuff, I can just write from anywhere, even my phone if that's what I choose to do. Even the default included extensions are really easy to use and get going, although most do need to be enabled from the dashboard, as they are disabled by default. Still, this is lovely software that is a joy to use, except the critical showstopper I mention, comments and likes not working at all. If I can resolve this one thing, it will be just right. But for now, since I have exactly what I need to import every post I made since September of 2009 into just about any software available, I will keep trying to find what works best for me, although I will keep looking for Chyrp Lite updates, hoping that my problem will be fixed there. Now to report the bug somehow in a way that doesn't require that I get an account with Microsoft.

And here I thought a Tumblr import either into Chyrp Lite or WordPress would be so simple even a caveman could do it. Boy was I wrong! The migration assistant built into Chyrp Lite is easy enough, but it gave me unexplainable errors. But apparently all it was supposed to need was my Tumblr URL. Looking at the WordPress importer, I saw that it needed a lot more. This was perfectly fine, as I planned to import my Tumblr into WordPress, then move that into Chyrp Lite, as it appears it has everything I need baked right in, and so far it's much much faster. Imagine my surprise when I go into my Tumblr account and see that I already registered an app called "The Kyle File," but that it pointed to the wrong domain. Still I thought I would go ahead and register a new app to get an authorization key. So I completed the process and I got my key. But then when I tried to copy and paste the authorization signature key and the secret key issued by Tumblr into my WordPress importer, Wouldn't you know, it didn't like that key either. It told me it didn't match the expected value. BUT TUMBLR GAVE ME THE KEYS! So I edited the app I already had and gave it the correct email and URL, and copied and pasted the keys to the original app registration. Same old error. Authorization signature doesn't match the expected value. There are a couple of things to do now. I can either import the posts I have one at a time into Chyrp Lite, especially since I was able to back up the entirety of my Tumblelog, all 9.5MB of it, but that would be a chore and a half that could take days, or I can just put the lot of the HTML files into Nikola and be happy with a static site that will be online for the next 50 years, but will have no comments, as I will certainly not use Microsoft Github issues, Disqus, Facebook or any other 3rd-party hosted comment system.

The single casualty of my recent server OS update and control panel migration is my WordPress blog. Restoring the database, even to a clean install, results in an unexplainable "critical error," and floods my error logs with messages about function calls with either too few or too many arguments. I was able to get the RSS feeds for both my posts and all comments since my migration to self-hosted WordPress roughly 10 years ago, but importing them even into a fresh WordPress install fails because the RSS importer plugin they have me install from my admin dashboard is incompatible with the latest version of WordPress, and appears that it has been unmaintained through all 5.x versions of the core software. It also crashes out with a "critical error" as soon as I upload the feed to be imported, and even immediately sends me a nice little email telling me all about it.

Looking for replacements, I have tried everything from static site generators such as Nikola, Pelican and Hugo, flat-file CMS software such as Grav and even alternatives that use a database such as Chyrp Lite. None of these seem to be able to both import my RSS feed and give me a halfway-decent commenting system.

Nikola was hands-down the best when it came to importing my feed. It retained every link, every word that I posted since 2012, and didn't really even break a sweat doing it. So now I have a very well-organized grouping of posts, complete with my categories and tags and all, in separate static HTML files that I can easily store anywhere. Nikola will even make it possible to sync up to my NextCloud for backup purposes, and I can even deploy my site over rsync after adding new posts to it. The huge problem is the same that I found with other static generators: they support very few comment system providers, even less self-hosted systems, and the self-hosted systems they do support require tons of proxy/reverse proxy/Docker and other esoteric kinds of things. I did everything to try to get one of them working, and it left me scratching my head, with an empty comment section and no form to speak of anywhere.

So I tried to go the flat-file route. No database makes for extremely easy backups, and my control panel does these backups without difficulty every day, although for the first time ever, my databases are now also backed up right along with my websites and email accounts since the migration. Still, I like having several copies of things without having to screw around with database dumps that ultimately still can cause problems like what happened with WordPress. The best and most up-to-date flat-file CMS seems to be Grav, and it has a quick installer in my hosting panel, so I gave it a shot. It even has plugins that add comments to my posts, and they can be enabled and disabled per page route. But now I'm having problems with the comment plugins, and didn't even try the RSS import. One comment plugin, just called Comments, doesn't allow me to moderate comments at all. I mean I'm not trying to keep humans out under any circumstances. Say you hate me, even threaten me if you like. If you're human, you have the right to your opinion on my blog. But I do want to take some steps to deter bots or delete their spam comments, and even when I deleted a comment's text from the .yaml file corresponding to the page where the comment was left, it didn't ever disappear from the page until a new comment was left. There is a newer, as in the latest update is just 3 weeks old, plugin that is called Better Comments, and it allows me to approve or deny comments from my admin dashboard, or even delete them altogether. But although the latest update is 3 weeks old, it doesn't work. Using the Comments plugin, I filled the form with a test comment and I immediately received an email notification that a comment was left, and on the page where I left the comment, I received a "Thank you for your comment" message and could see the comment posted right below the form. Better Comments however just stopped after sending the email. No "thank you for your comment" message appeared, no comment appeared in my admin dashboard, and the .yaml file corresponding to the page where I posted my test comment was even written. So I guess I found a bug, but all this stuff is on Microsoft GitHub, and I don't want to have to get any account controlled by Microsoft just to report a bug that is not related to Microsoft in any way. And all this was just running the samples and tests, no real content at this point, as again, I didn't even attempt the import of my posts feed.

Lastly so far, I tried Chyrp Lite. But instead of using MySQL or Postgres, I decided to give SQLite3 a shot. The real beauty of SQLite3 is in its simplicity. My database is actually a file, so there is no HTTP request even to localhost in order to access it. I stick it in my private folder where php can see it but no one else can get at it, and I can even copy it over to have in several places in case of a failure. And you can't beat no copyright public domain code either. BUt this time, I never even got to the comment system. I simply can't import my feed. First of all, Chyrp Lite wants an Atom feed, and what I got from WordPress, or rather from the Wayback Machine, was RSS. I checked it, they never captured the Atom feeds, only the RSS feeds for comments and posts and the posts, comments and pages themselves, right down to the comment forms. The Internet Archive was extremely thorough, but not thorough enough to get an Atom feed. So I tried importing the RSS feed into Chyrp Lite just to see what would happen, and as expected, the result was an error stating that the post export file was invalid. I looked all over for a converter that would take my RSS feed and output an Atom feed, and eventually came back to Nikola, which did such a great job splitting my post RSS feed out into separate categorized and properly tagged HTML posts. I was able to take those separate and well-organized posts and get Nikola to turn them into one big Atom feed, no problem. Worked like the proverbial charm! But then when I took that Atom feed and tried to upload it into Chyrp Lite, I ended up with the same "The post export file is invalid" error. There was no explanation, no mention of what was in the feed that should not have been there, or what wasn't in the feed that should have been there, just an invalid file.

So now that I've tested all these things, I guess I have several options. The most appealing right now is to redeploy my Nikola site and just leave it up for historical purposes only, especially since I haven't really touched it in about 6 years except to update the software, which ultimately caused its downfall. I'm more active on my Talkabout social network anyway, and it pretty much works like a blog of a sort. Another thing I could do, which would take much time indeed, is to rebuild a brand new WordPress site using these properly categorized and tagged posts that Nikola gave me. I know that it is possible to change the publishing dates on new posts, so they will definitely show up where they need to be. But again, I don't really feel like dealing with the headache, especially since WordPress fell down and went boom after 10 years, so it could just as easily happen again. And I really mostly stopped blogging when I tried to post using my Markdown editor and found that I couldn't use it anymore, and I don't think there is a replacement for it now. I also never fully understood the concept of blocks and all that stuff when all I really want to do when I get ready to write a post is exactly what I'm doing here; I just want to sit down and write, in something as simple as Markdown, which is easy to write and easy to read, and the structure doesn't get in the way of either the writing or the reading. Of course the other option is to keep looking. I'm sure I've missed something somewhere. Hopefully in that case I will find another self-hosted blog where I can allow or deny comments and also import my feed to retain all my old posts, and I can still sit down and write a mind-blowing post in simple Markdown, complete with links and text styling and all. There's no end to Markdown renderers out here, but the other stuff seems to be near impossible to find, especially when I'm specifically looking for software that is less than two years old.

AND THE LIGHTBULB COMES ON! I just remembered that I still have a very old Tumblr blog. It appears that it actually retains all posts going even further back than just the past 10 years, probably going back all the way to when I switched off of Posterous before it got switched off. I was able to get signed in and everything, though I had lost my password and had to reset it. I can't believe that site is even still up! So my journey begins again. I know that WordPress has a Tumblr importer if I want to try that, assuming it still works with the latest version of the core software. If not, I do know that other software will in fact take a Tumblr blog and import it. And maybe I can even get a feed. So here goes nothing. Talkabout is my main place to do my posting at this point, but I did have I think it was dlvr.it or something way back in the day that replicated every single post I made on WordPress up to the last one. I'm looking right at it as I write this, so all is not lost after all, since I have a whole nother road to ride down now.