Josh Horne

My Not-So-New, But Totally Improved Tumblr

I am officially launching my Tumblr page as the place to learn about me and my music. I have been playing and performing in various settings for a long time but I have never had a place on the Net where I could share my thoughts about music and what I am working on. I figured that my heretofore neglected Tumblr page would be a great place to start.

Here you will find pages about my music, my philosophy and thoughts on creating music people love, and some geeky guitar gear info. I am also creating a Listen page where you can here the projects I have worked on in the past as well as some newer stuff I will be working on that will showcase the different sides of my playing and style. So stay tuned for that.

You can also friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Pre-order Eric Vinson’s “Rhythm of the World”

I have been campaining for Eric Vinson’s new record lately (as you may have noticed. He is a great songwriter from Nashville and his music is honest and heart-felt. I encourage you to check out some of his previous work and then consider pre-ordering his new record. He only needs a little over $200 more to be able to complete the mixing and in addition to receiving an early copy of “Rhythm of the World” you will receive an invitation to an invitation-only house show that Eric will be performing. So give him a listen…then give him some money!

Getting Geeky on Guitar

So I have been getting nerdier in my old age. I have been a guitar geek more years than I can remember (okay, I can remember: 16 years). Looking for great tone and talking about the latest (and the oldest) gear are among my musical past times. Lately I have discovered a new level of guitar geekery: effects pedal modification.

I am just dipping my toe in the water at this point. My first project is to repair and modify a 90’s era Electro-harmonix/Sovtek Small Stone Phaser pedal. Two problems are inherent with this pedal. First it is not true bypass. This means that even when it is not engaged you can still hear the faint swirling of the effect going on in the background. True bypass means that the signal is routed directly from input to output (bypassing the circuit altogether) when the pedal is not engaged so that only your true, unaffected tone comes through. Replacing the footswitch with a 3PDT true bypass will remedy this. It should be a straightforward repair.

The second problem is the volume drops when the effect is engaged. The fix for this is a little trickier. It involves removing two resistors from the internal circuit board and replacing them with two higher impedence resistors. I know this may sound like greek to some of you but trust me…it’s going to be tricky for a newbie like me. However I am looking forward to giving it a shot.

I may also release my inner design geek and remove the guts from it’s ugly army green enclosure and put it in a new enclosure of my own design. We’ll see how the initial repairs go first.

My other endeavor is to build a footswitch for another pedal of mine out of a pill box, a basic momentary switch, a 1/4” mono jack and two pieces of wire and do it as cheap as possible. This will be a very easy build but will be fun nonetheless.

I hope to get to do more tweaking and building in the future. But one step at a time: let’s see if I can fix my Small Stone without ruining it.

WordPress to Tumblr

julioangelortiz:

So here we are… I have moved and set up shop at Tumblr.  I can’t help but be reminded of my buddy Allyn Gibson… how he (and myself, to be honest) love to tweak with WordPress themes and looks, I seem to like to move from provider to provider.  I would drive my old friend Rachael crazy, who specializes on SEO for websites.

The latest move was driven more by my recent lack of updates.  WordPress is great and flexible, and I can have my Twitter updates and latest listened tracks display in the sidebar, but at the end of the day, WordPress is a lot of tinkering and upkeep.  And after a while, you can get focused on that aspect of the site as opposed to what really matters:  the content.

And I had started to get back to the content; after a light month of posts, I started to get back into a semi-regular routine of updating Vox Bomb.  But I wanted to shake things up even further.  Part of that involved taking co-worker and all-around cool guy Brad’s suggestion and opening up a Disqus account for comments; I imported all the comments from the WordPress site into the new Disqus account for preservation.   Moving forward, I will be using Disqus for all blog commentary.  It just makes sense to have a “blog neutral” system for comments (much in the same way I use another site for hosting images; this makes migration so much easier). Thanks Brad!

When I finally decided to migrate to Tumblr, there were a few key obstacles to overcome:

• There is no direct method of importing WordPress posts into Tumblr.
• I wanted to preserve all the tags associated with the WordPress posts as they were transferred over.
• I did not want previous comments lost.

The final point was resolved with Disqus, but what of the other two?

In the end, I wound up being able to do this, but it was a bit involved.  It entailed exporting my WordPress site to Blogger, then using a special online tool to migrate the Blogger site to Tumblr.

Here’s what I did:

1. Export your WordPress blog to an XML file.  For self-hosted WordPress sites, after logging in to your WordPress account, go to the Dashboard, and down along the sidebar you will see the Tools link.  Click on this, and you will see an Export option.  It’s pretty straightforward after this.
2. If your XML file is less than 1MB in size, you can go to this site in order to convert the WordPress XML file into a Blogger-compatible XML file.  Then go to step 4.
3. If your XML file is larger than 1MB in size, you’ll need to try the following. Bear in mind that you can probably do the following in less steps, but I am going to explain how I did it, what worked best for me, and you can adjust from there.  
   • It would be best if you had a text editor that can deal with multiple, large files easily; I’m partial to Crimson Editor.  Also, make a backup copy of your WordPress XML file.
   • Take your XML file and open it in your editor of choice.  You’ll see a bunch of text at the beginning explaining what the XML file is.  As you scroll down, you’ll see comments / syntax, and you’ll see your blog information (such as title, etc.), along with the categories and tags listed.  Scroll down through your listed tags until you see the line <item>.  This signifies the beginning of your posts in the XML file.  What you’ll want to do is take everything from the beginning of the XML file down to just before the first <item> listing and copy that to a new text file.  Call it whatever you want; I’ll be using the name xmltemplate.txt for this article.
   • Scroll down to the very bottom of your XML file.  You’ll see the last two lines are </channel> and </rss> (on separate lines).  Copy these two lines to the end of your xmltemplate.txt file (hit enter a few times to leave space between these two lines and the larger block of text you copied in the previous step).  Save this file.
   • Keep your WordPress XML file open.  Copy the contents of your xmltemplate.txt file to a new text file.
   • Now, remember that first <item> heading we found earlier in your WordPress XML file?  What you’ll want to do is start copying from that point (including the <item>) on down.  How much you copy depends on how large your XML file is; what you’re looking to do is create a new XML file that is less than 1MB in size so that you can import it to be translated to a format Blogger can understand.  So if your WordPress file is 2MB in size, you may need to create 2 or 3 smaller XML files using this process. What is critical is that you end your selected text at an </item> tag, which denotes the end of a post, before copying.
   • Take the text you just copied and paste it into your new file containing the xmltemplate information.  You will want to paste it in just before the </channel> tag, in those extra returns I told you to enter earlier.
   • Save this new file with a .xml extension (WP1.xml, for example). Make sure that it is not greater than 1MB in size.
   • Repeat the above steps, taking the text from your xmltemplate.txt file and pasting it into a new text file, and then copying posts from where you left off in the WordPress XML file beginning with the <item> tag.  Remember: always start copying at an <item> tag, and end your selected text at an </item> tag.
   • Once you are done breaking your WordPress XML out into smaller files, you can go to this site in order to convert the WordPress XML files into Blogger-compatible XML files.  Note:  after converting a file, verify the size of the new XML file.  It should be comparable in size to its counterpart WordPress XML file.  If the resulting Blogger XML file is tiny (around 1K), open the file up in a text editor and you should see it contains an error.  This means that the XML file you tried converting was improperly formatted.  You will need to go back and double-check that you followed the above steps correctly, fix any missing tags, and try converting it again.
4. Go to the Blogger Dashboard. If you do not have a Blogger account, set one up.  Otherwise, create a new, basic blog.  Once created, go into its Settings.  Under the Basics heading, you’ll see a link near the top that says Import Blog.  Click on this, and follow the instructions to choose the Blogger-compatible XML file you created in step 2 or 3.  Make sure to check the box Automatically publish all imported posts.  Once you click the Import Blog button, it will take a few moments for the process to complete.  Once it has finished, click on the Dashboard and verify that the blog entries have been properly published and retained all the tags.  If you have multiple XML files to import, repeat this process until you have imported all of your posts.
5. Once your temporary Blogger site is ready, go to this site, which is an online tool for importing Blogger sites into Tumblr.  Follow the straightforward on-screen instructions to complete your journey.  Note: for those uncomfortable with supplying your Tumblr password, just change it beforehand and change it back after the process is complete.  That’s what I did.
6. And now you should be done.

One tip:  make sure that you turn off the option to send updates to Twitter before you import your posts.  Outside of tweeting a number of old posts, I unwittingly went over my Twitter limit because I forgot to turn off this option before the import.

And there’s my experience with moving over from WordPress to Tumblr.  I’ll probably be tweaking this “guide” in the future; if you find it useful, feel free to drop me a line.  If you have any tips / suggestions, let me know and I’ll update the guide accordingly.