According to Jim

Below the ripple voltage chart explanation is an email thread that I thought would be interesting to share. Note, permission was provided to reprint it here. The subject of the email is: Fat Caps & Ripple Current…

The following ripple voltage chart is provided for reference material.

Capacitor Discharge Results in Ripple Current

Understanding the Ripple Voltage Drawing Above

The faster the capacitor discharges, the more ripple will be present. If the capacitor in the circuit is underrated or completely bad, it will not properly hold a charge, and thus the electronics circuit will have maximum ripple present. When a capacitance filtering circuit is faulty, picture the valleys on the voltage being very deep relative to the peaks, and the ripple current will shoot up proportionally in the circuit, with the result of a major increase in heat being generated in all the circuits supplied by the power supply voltage that should be a regulated level DC, which would now effectively be an AC ripple voltage. This will quickly result in thermal breakdowns in various components on the circuit boards, causing a cascading component(s) failure(s) affect.

Picture Courtesy of HyperPhysics Department of Georgia State University – Development of Ripple Expressions

I thought it would be interesting and educational to hear from an expert in the engineering and circuit design field. The following is the email dialog conversation I had with Dean Palmer, engineer/owner of MicroDyne Engineering, LLC, an electronics research, design, and development services company, located in Queen Creek, Arizona, USA.

Dear Jim,

I stumbled upon your very informative “Capacitors” web page today and enjoyed your article on DIY lead free soldering and circuit repairs. I too encourage people to try to service their own stuff where possible. And this leads me to the following question:

I have a Panasonic DVD player/recorder (Model DMR-ES15) that has a recurrent “U61″ error that, in the owner’s literature, is stated more or less to be a power related problem. So I open up the unit and discover a single (but large) aluminum electrolytic cap on the main power converter sourced directly from the DC rectified AC mains. A check around the Web and I see that many owners of this product have been experiencing similar “U61″ problems with their units; some failing after only a few months of operation; most just after their 1 year warranty expires. So I get my trusty Tek 2467 scope on the circuit and I see a HUGE amount of ripple at the pins of the capacitor, yet the capacitor tests good! I replace it anyway with a good quality low ESR hi-temp Nichicon and still there is terrible ripple on that node. The power supply seems to have a load related voltage regulation problem and there is a lot of ripple and harmonic noise on the output. Doubling up on the capacitor even though there was no room on the board (had to dead-bug it) was the only way I could quiet down the circuit.

After visiting your page, I too thought that this part (or others) had possibly been damaged by the lead-free thing and the higher heat production methods used to build this unit – there is lead-free solder everywhere, even though the date of manufacture was 2006. But now I’m convinced that the part was actually under-designed for the requirements of the circuit. And, I’ve seen high ripple on computer mother board caps from time to time that caused all sorts of malfunctions and random errors/reboots, and also in a couple of LCD displays I worked on. In addition, there is an under-designed heat sink on the video processor chip in this DVD player – it gets seriously frying hot when playing back or recording a DVD – which cannot be good for the chip or it’s tiny ball grid array solder connections.

So my question to you is, why are manufacturers under-designing the circuitry in these products? Are these companies so desperate to maximize profits that they apply MTBF and service data back into the manufacturing process to find ways to cut back on design quality and circuit components to just get them through the warranty period? I’ve heard they can actually tweak this down to a granularity of weeks. Or, are we just seeing rampant designer incompetence all across the board – engineers who do not know how to do simple calculations for ripple current and thermal dissipation? Could these guys even balance their check books? What are they teaching in the EE programs these days???

I would be very interested in your thoughts on this! At any rate, Ha, it keeps me in business.

Thanks very much!

–
Dean Palmer
Engineer, NPD

MicroDyne Engineering, LLC

Queen Creek, Arizona
USA
480.888.0600
www.microdyneeng.com

—

Jim W. wrote back:

Hello Dean,

Wow, you got my mind filled with all types of thoughts. First off, my experience in the electronics field goes back more years than I care to imagine: http://jimwarholic.com/about.

I constantly see problems related to component failures more and more frequently. I honestly believe that everything is designed with a time value. Capacitors have a certain time value to heat rating. If you operate a capacitor near its maximum rating, the capacitor will last X amount of time. If you operate a capacitor at 1/2 the maximum rating, you will likely get 2X life or more out of the capacitor. So, it comes down to the engineers specifying the ratings on the capacitors without fully understanding the time value. The differences in costs are very very minuscule if anything at all. But, when they call for a value of 2200 uF cap at 10 volts because the maximum voltage might be only 10 volts, but the circuit is actually operating at 10 volts, then in essence the capacitor is operating at 100% of its maximum voltage. They could just as easily installed a 16 volt capacitor, that might be slightly larger, (though they would have had to design for this larger size) but would have lasted probably more than twice as long, because it would have only been operating at 63% of its maximum operating voltage, and more than likely would have operated at a cooler temperature too. So, the engineers need to take into account the time value, which is probably not being stressed at all.

These power circuits generate tons of heat on their own, and that also is not being taken into account. This causes a cascade effect, which causes more heat, and more breakdown, and more heat, etc.

Here are a couple of pointers to consider when troubleshooting power supply circuits. Most power supply circuits start with full wave rectification. If only one half of the rectification process is working, the capacitors will not be able to filter the voltage properly. Also, there are many times the regulator circuits are failing. So, the voltage drops under load, the regulator can not keep up and therefore the caps try to maintain the voltage, but heat builds up due to excessive current draw.

With the push towards smaller, more compact designs, this causes the engineers to simply go with the smallest of the specs that they can get away with. So, when the final design comes out, and it goes out for build, the builder (assembly house) simply follows the component specs and then gets its supply of components sent from the manufacturer. Once again, at each leg of the manufacturing process, the specs are used as the guide. If the specs are just of a minimal value, and the manufacturer supplies the component with that value, the question comes down to, who’s fault is it?

Did the engineer look at a data sheet of components and see that the standard is a 2000 hr. rated capacitor at TEMP, OP. MAX:105(DEGREE C) and in essence say that will be good enough? Probably. Did the manufacturer of the component, simply target the minimum standard? Probably.

Have computer companies looked at the life cycle of computers being somewhere between three and five years, and say, that if it lasts for four or five years it’s probably good enough? My guess is yes.

However, computers have gotten to the point where even if you go twice as fast for most activities, it really doesn’t matter much. So, more and more of us are keeping our computers for a longer period of time.

Does the manufacturer hold some degree of responsibility for a design that should last longer than the warranty period? And if so, how long? The short answer, is yes. However, the long answer is much more complex than meets the eye. There is always a trade off between price, design, and life expectancy.

I was really ticked off, and still am ticked off to this day, when my Apple failed, two months out of warranty, and the Genius Bar folks said, “Why don’t you just buy a new iMac? The price of a new one is only several hundred dollars more than the parts for the old one.” It was at that point, I had to taken action in my own hands. http://jimwarholic.com/apple

Thank you for listening. Maybe I will post this online, without adding your name to the mix.

Regards,

Jim

Dean Palmer wrote:

Thanks Jim for answering my question! I appreciate your comments very much. And I am right with you on being very upset that your MAC dies right after the warranty period is up. I think that manufacturers should be held accountable for the quality of their products. I know that in reality, it’s “Buyer Beware!” – “If you don’t like my brand, buy someone else’s” … but really, is that the way you’d want YOUR company to do business? The whole attitude out there seems to be “make as much money as you can with as little cost as possible put into it…” – that seems to be capitalism at its worst where greed and lust for wealth and profit creates an environment where crap is king and corporations are driven to make things as cheap as they can get away with! But in the end, we are ALL consumers of products and services. Even the CEO Of SONY, or Toshiba, or in my case, Panasonic – all are consumers. When he goes to buy his Mercedes Benz, would HE be satisfied that it just (barely) meets the warranty period before some major failure occurs? No! He’ll be on the phone to Mercedes to raise hell about it!

So whatever happened to having pride in your product and its quality of workmanship? As you pointed out, for just a few cents more, a better suited capacitor could have been used in the circuit and this would have avoided thousands of upset consumers and calls to service centers. The way I see it, it’s a reputation thing as well as being an ethical matter. When I do a design for my Clients, I want my design to be the best it can be. I was raised by a very demanding and “military authoritative” father who insisted on perfection; to do the best job you can do – or don’t do the job at all. So it’s in my makeup to give my Clients 110 percent on every project that crosses my desk. I will cut corners in design or materials ONLY if they tell me to do so, but with great reservation and reluctance. And for the money I pay for a new TV set, I expect it to last for many years. My parents had an old Motorola Quasar “Works In The Drawer” TV that we had for probably 12 or more years. It was a hybrid design made with tubes and transistors, and a couple ICs. It lasted until the picture tube finally gave up. Wow! But these days, this kind of quality and reliability just isn’t seen anymore. It’s very sad really, especially in the light of technology being so advanced – you could build a DVD player that should last 20 years. And as consumers, have we, for the most part, become used to mediocrity in everything we buy?

No matter what brand I choose, it’s gonna have problems? There just has to be a balance between profits and getting your new gizmo to market before the competition, and building a product of decent quality and reliability. And it seems that the consumer public – you and me included – needs to drive this shift in corporate paradigm by DEMANDING high quality and exceptional reliability from manufacturers. And by the same token, we should also be willing to pay a little extra for it. If I want to buy some off-brand TV set for 79 bucks at Walmart, I can do that, and I’ll get what I get. But when I pay $895.00 for a bran new shiny SONY with all the bells and whistles that even pours me coffee, I EXPECT it to last and last and last. Maybe I’m too much the old school, I don’t know. But I would NEVER design in a 10 volt capacitor into a 10 volt circuit! I “might” design a 20 volt part in there if I’m in a good mood. But I’ll probably and most likely use a 50 volter! And really, what does that do to the end cost of the product? Not much.

There are so many other factors that go into the total cost to manufacture and sell an appliance. One of the biggies is that damn paranoia about lead in the environment (RoHS)! For God’s Sake, don’t people know that lead comes from the ground in the first place? How much of this is political and how much of it really makes sense in the name of public health and the environment? And a lot of the cost to make a product comes from efficiency and the internal structure of the company. Some companies are so wasteful and inefficient that they could build their products lined with gold if they’d just cut out the waste and inefficient practices, and perhaps limit those million dollar bonuses to CEOs. The list is endless, but taking such clean up measures would pay for a better capacitor, diode, or heat sink a thousand fold. And personally, I will pay more as long as I KNOW that I am buying quality. The tires on my car and the brakes I use are the best money can buy. There are some things you just don’t cheapen your way out of! I can buy a cheap DVD player if I want. But I probably won’t. I want good quality at a reasonable price. And I adhere to the Three-To-One policy: for a one year warranty, a product should last three years at the very minimum! Really, warranties are to protect the consumer from DOAs and accidental defects that can sometimes occur in manufacturing or materials. It should NOT be an indicator as to how long I can expect the product to work!

I’ve enjoyed our conversation Jim! Thank you for allowing me to rant. And you may use my name in connection with any of my comments you wish to publish. I hope if you do publish this dialog, it will get people visiting your site to thinking – and demanding – quality and reliability. Next to a fair price, what else matters?

-Dean Palmer

Dean Palmer
Engineer, NPD

MicroDyne Engineering, LLC

Queen Creek, Arizona
USA
480.888.0600
www.microdyneeng.com

“MicroDyne Engineering provides Electronics Design, Research and Development (R&D) and Prototype Design and Assembly services to customers and clients who wish to bring a new technology product idea from concept to actual hardware realization. Their goal is to provide clients and customers with product designs and solutions for markets and applications that would benefit from innovation and value-added product designs.

Reverse-Engineering services can also be provided for existing technology products and devices where the original documentation and component sources are non existent or no longer available.”

Thank you Dean for sharing your insight into the wonderful world of electronics research, design, and product development, with this first hand look into engineering and design of electronics’ products. The mind of an engineer is …

I would also like to extend a big thank you to Dean for granting permission to reprint this here.

Note, all copyrights are reserved.

Regards,

Jim Warholic

Permanent Link to: Fat Caps & Ripple Current…

A while back, my wife and I went on a field trip for one of her extra, ongoing, lifetime, college courses to the Hiller Aviation Institute, Museum, Education and Research Center. The Hiller Air Museum is located at 601 Skyway Road, San Carlos, CA 94070. The hours of operation are from 10am to 5pm, 7days a week. Admission as of this writing is Adults – $11.00, Seniors (Age 65+) $7.00, Youths (5-17) $7.00, and Children (4 and under) free with paid adult.

This is a really fun place to take in the sights and sounds of aviation history. There are a large number of exhibits to take in. There is even a Boeing 747-136 forward section of the fuselage with the cockpit on full display that is available for viewing and even sit down in the pilot’s or copilot’s seat to move a knob or two on the avionics control panels.

There were some really cool old airplanes of yesteryear to view above your head. And there were indeed some wild looking contraptions that never got off the ground.

This is definitely a fun place to spend a half a day, or more, if you are really into the history of aviation.

Here are a few more pictures of things to view at the Hiller Air Museum.

The 1929 Stinson

Pictured above is the 1909 Wright Engine. “This is one of two airworthy copies of the 1909 Wright engine built by John Palmer. One will be used to power a replica of Robert Fowler’s 1911 Model ‘B’ airplane. The airplane will be displayed here with an original 1911 engine. This engine was built in 1998 at Campbell, CA, with the assistance of William Renaud. 30 horsepower, 170 lb. dry weight.

In addition to this being a place for adults to spend some leisurely activity, it is a great place for field trips for school students of all ages. The staff is quite knowledgeable and provides various types of guided tours and hands on activities. For more information, visit www.hiller.org for the details published online.

Have Fun!

Permanent Link to: Hiller Air Museum

This was an email from Marty S., who wrote, "Just wanted to let you know that there are bad caps on Apple G4 eMac logic boards. There were 5 different models, and I think there were only slight differences between the logic boards. The one in the photo is Apple part # 820-1591-A, from a 1.25 GHz system. Needs 5 units of 1000 uF 16v, and 8 units of 1800 uF 6.3v. One happy aspect that these are pre-RoHS machines, which means you can actually get the failed caps out without a struggle."

Thank you Marty for the information, and the insight about the standard solder. I have the high quality, low ESR cap kits available for sale at www.jwestsales.com.

Order your Apple eMac Capacitor Kit here.

Permanent Link to: Apple eMac Logic Card Bad Cap Locations

Exactly how how do you test the PSUs out of the iMacs?
How do you turn on the iMac G5 power supply when it is out of the computer?

iMac G5 Power Supply connectors – P-1

On the 661-3350 power supply, jumper pins 15 (gray) and 16 (blk/gnd). This turns the supply on and you should see all the voltages listed above with a DC voltage meter. Between pins 22 and any GND, you will see approx. 24vdc, which is needed for the backlight. Note that the plug is numbered on the wired side of the connector plug. You will need some good lighting to see the numbers. A small flashlight comes in handy.

From what I have been able to tell, the other power supplies in both the 17 inch and 20 inch iMac G5 computers all used the same DC voltage pinout arrangements. I believe the voltage pinout arrangements are different on the Intel iMacs and some of the iSight models.

Please read the detailed information for repairing Apple iMac G5 power supplies.

If anyone has more information for any of the power supplies used on the various Mac products, including the various PPC models, Intel Models, and Power Macs, please send it to me.

Thank you.

Regards,

Jim

Permanent Link to: Measuring iMac G5 Power Supply Voltages at Connector Plug Pinouts

Blogger 2 WordPress Conversion Procedure:

Welcome to my new According to Jim WordPress website look.

By now, most folks have probably heard about the end of life support for FTP publishing via the Blogger online system of being able to post directly to your own server using FTP publishing. Blogger has a FTP migration solution to transfer your FTP blog, and move it to a custom subdomain or even a blogspot.com address if you so desire. See: FTP Migration Tool Released for information and a video on how to do the Blogger FTP switch. I have used the tool on some FTP blogs, and it does work. However, I wanted to do something different here.

Welcome to my Blogger converted to WordPress blog with FTP migration changes.

This is a writeup about the procedure, tips, pitfalls, and what needs to be done for everything to work right when converting from Blogger FTP publishing to WordPress publishing.

Blogger to WordPress Conversion Criteria for Everything to Function Properly

• Switch to WordPress from Blogger FTP publishing.
• Make sure file names (including archives, labels, and posting pages) were the same from the old system to the new WP system.
• New blog must be SEO friendly and maintain Google PageRank.
• Set up .htaccess redirects for seamless intergration with new WordPress categories vs Blogger labels.
• Support for PHP “includes” for file pages.
• Allow for any type of file naming convention (i.e.: .htm, .html, or .php) at the old file names to the new file names and must be seamless from the old to the new.
• Blog posting must also include all original comments.
• Be able to merge two or more blogs together in one new WordPress blog.
• And, last but not least, as if I have to say this, the new WordPress blog must work.

Below is the process I used for converting to a WordPress blog.

Suffice it to say, there was a fair amount of work involved with the conversion.

I have to say at this point, the WordPress blogging platform is a very powerful tool. It also can be somewhat intimidating for someone to first install and use it.

Step One: Create a WordPress blog on your website.

There are a couple of things to consider when initially setting up a WordPress blog directly on your own server for the first time. If you already have an FTP blog using Blogger to a subdirectory (i.e. yoursite. com/blog) or are using the naked domain name (i.e. yoursite.com) as the FTP blog posting area for all your postings, or even multiple blogs on the same domain name with Blogger, then you will need to consider a few things before stepping forward.

In my particular case I had a number of subdirectories prior to installing a WordPress blog on my website. Since I did not have a subdirectory called “blog” I decided to install WordPress into that directory. There were two main benefits to installing it in a subdirectory. This provided a work in progress design area for creating and customizing the blog, without it affecting any of my other content on the website. This also turned into what was a major plus for the future, with an quick and easy option to make it the main website, without having to reinstall the WP blog at the root level. I’ll go into more detail with this later.

To create the blog, is very easy if you have a “cPanel” hosting provider. cPanel hosting is my favorite, because of the powerful tools available to users and webmasters. For example, most cPanel hosting providers have installed the Fantastico De Luxe software script that makes installing WordPress easy. Fantastico also makes it a breeze installing over 50 other programs such as, web content management systems, shopping carts, wikis, various blog open source software, photo sharing, surveys, and other cool software too. If you don’t have Fantastico from your hosting provider, and they do not automatically include WordPrss in the hosting package, then you will need to install WordPress manually. You can go to the WordPress website for more information and detailed direction on how to do that.

Step Two: Customization of the WordPress Blog

Once the WordPress blog is created on your sever, it is at a level that is a very basic installation but fully functional. There is a first posting created for you along with a generic template. You can use the template if you wish, but most folks will want a cool customized template, suited to their own tastes. There are thousands of WordPress templates available for free at the WordPress website or other websites online. You can even download a number of different templates and upload them to your server, and switch from one to the other with a template selection button. However, once you settle on a particular template, then you will probably want to stick with that one, because ultimately you will have more WP template customizations that you will do.

Step Three: Import Blogger Postings and Comments

First thing to do before messing with your Blogger blog is to export a backup XML file from the Blogger settings tab in the blog administrative panel. Do this first, because you will actually need this XML file later for the comments import.

The reason to import your old FTP Blogger postings is so you can eventually turn the original Blogger blog hosted on your own server, and redirect or make it so all the WordPress postings’ file names are the same as the orignal Blogger FTP postings. WordPress has an import tool that I thought was going to be the perfect tool to do the job of importing not only the postings from Blogger, but also the comments too. However, there was a problem with the importing of the comments. The WordPress import did not import all the comments. Before I go into the details on the issue with the comments, I need to point out what I did to even allow importing of the postings to the WordPress blog to begin with.

Blogger provides a FTP Blogger Migration Tool and FAQs for conversion of FTP blogs hosted on your own server, to Blogger hosted, either with a .blogspot.com subdomain name or a Custom Domain name (i.e. blog.yoursite .com). I would suggest reading that in detail to decide which way you wish to go and before clicking the FTP Migration tool in your Blogger Dashboard area.

As far as the WordPress importing postings, you need to know that you can not import directly from a FTP published blog using the WordPress import tool. It requires you to switch your blog to a blogspot.com subdomain name or yoursite custom domain name. Since I was not sure the WordPress solution was going to work for me, I still wanted the option of using the Blogger FTP Migration tool and migrating to a custom domain name permanently for writing my online articles in the future.

In my case, what I did was essentially make it so the Blogger FTP Migration would only go part way to fully completing the migration switch to my own custom domain at: abc.jimwarholic.com. I blocked Blogger from republishing the new updated meta redirected files and not letting the system automatically upload them to my server by changing the password at the Blogger administrative publishing settings tab to the wrong value. I think that is the first time I ever entered the wrong value for a password on purpose. This stopped the full migration process at the point of updating the old postings with meta redirects included in the postings. At that point in the migration process, I was provided a link to the ZIP file to download, with all of the updated files that I could manually upload to my server if I ever wanted to do that in the future. I also did not want a double content SEO penalty at abc.jimwarholic.com, so I included the following meta tag in the header section of the new blog only, to prevent the search engines from cataloging my content at the new abc.jimwarholic.com website. If you want to see how this code looks in the header section of my ABC website, click my ABC link and select view source code from your browser menu area. Also read about this at the Google Webmaster Help area online. Here is the code that I entered in the new blog:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

This provided me a safe place, and reachable online, to keep my old postings banked while I updated my main website at www.jimwarholic.com. Also note that the old original files were still sitting on www.jimwarholic.com during this whole WP conversion process and were still functional to the point that the information could be fully navigated to from the external and internal links, and the search engine results pages.

Once the old blog information was converted to the new Blogger Custom Domain name website, I was able to do a importing of the blog postings from the new website to my WordPress blog that resided at www.jimwarholic.com/blog. This however, is only half the battle. Blogger typically truncates the original blog posting file name (based on the title of the the original post) and leaves out smaller words at times in the file name. Before you do any importing of blog postings, you need to switch from the default WP file type Permalink Settings i.e. http://jimwarholic.com/?p=123 and need to turn on Custom Structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.php if you had PHP file names or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html if you had HTML ending file names. The WP importing tool looks at the title of the article and creates a new file name with that title, but does not use the original blog file names. I then uploaded a PHP script to my blog directory that automatically converted it to the original file names. Take a look at these two articles for more details on the cool PHP script for easy file conversion from the old to the new and more details on the Blogger to WordPress migration process:

• Moving From Blogger To WordPress – Maintaining Permalinks, Traffic & SEO
• Migrating a blog from Blogger to WordPress

Now, I had my file names the same, but some of my comments were missing in some of the postings that were imported. There seems to be some sort of glitch that some folks are experiencing when importing the postings directly from the blog using the WordPress importing tool. WordPress does not provide the option of importing from the XML exported file from Blogger, but there is a workaround. Once I had the file names exactly the same way I wanted them from the past, I then used another tool at http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com to convert the saved exported Blogger XML file from the top of Step #3 into a WordPress WXR export file that can be understood by the WordPress blog import button.

You might ask, why didn’t I just use the Blogger 2 WordPress tool to begin with? Well, that is a good question, and there are a number of reasons why it was not the ideal importing solution to begin with. First off, the export/import using the Blogger 2 WordPress tool was only effective at getting all the comments and postings into the new WordPress blog. It however had difficulty with the conversion and importing of Flash files within postings, and it also did not import a custom meta tag for original file names. Since there was no reference for the original file names, there was no way to run a script automatically to quickly change the file names on these imported postings. So, what I did was go through and edit the file names manually on the ones that had the comments, and then deleted the other imported postings that were duplicates.

Yes, this all took some time to do, and it requires a bit of critical thinking skills to keep track of what is what and where is it. It helps to use two windows and do side by side comparisons. Sometimes I had to copy the entire posting from one copy to the other that had all the comments, but might have been corrupted with the Flash internally in the post itself. Other times, I had to change the file name of the one I  did not want, to make the one I did want, the same as what was there to begin with. I know this sounds a bit confusing but the WordPress file system will not let you have two files with the same name.

Step Four: Creating Custom .HTACCESS Files and Redirects

I would like to give a special thank you to Alistair MacDonald and his article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. His insights were invaluable, along with his published .htaccess files were quite helpful in getting a handle on this part of the project.

Now that I had all the post files ending the same way and structured with a .php or .html file name for the postings, I needed to address the archives, labels (Blogger has labels) and categories (WordPress has categories, and also tags and pages). Also, keep in mind that at this step of the process, when you are about to begin switching things on and making them live, it is a good idea to have a complete backup of all of our public_html files from the website. You can use a standalone FTP program or even use a browser based cross-platform FTP like FireFTP for completely backing up your server files to your local disk.

This is where things start to get a bit more interesting. Remember that I mentioned in the beginning of this Blogger FTP to WordPress posting, that I created the WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “blog”? Well, I wanted to make the blog live at the root directory and for online readers to arrive at and navigate from the root. I did not want to have the subdirectory “blog” in my postings, labels/categories, archives, tags, and separate page file names.  A really cool feature of a WordPress installation is that it can be quickly changed to make it as though it is installed at the root of the website, without having to actually install it at the root level, while still keeping all WP files in the directory where it was originally installed. What I did, was basically follow the following WordPress article backwards for setting up a WordPress blog in its own directory. It required toggling how it was published from the WP settings area and uploading a change to the .htaccess file on the server.

The following directions are very important to follow when toggling where WordPress files are being published online, as in being displayed, and where all the WordPress files are located. This is taken from the WordPress information link above with a few clarifications:

• #7. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file.
• #8. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
• #9. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
  require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
  to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
  require(‘./yourdirectory/wp-blog-header.php’);
• #10. Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/yourdirectory/wp-admin/
• #11. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
• In my case, the “yourdirectory” is: “blog” i.e. www.jimwarholic.com/blog . This is where the WordPress files are located, but the files are actually displayed without the “blog” directory being displayed at the root of the website. The root of my website is where the index.php file is located.

This is what the index.php file looks like:

/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require(‘./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

Once I performed that process above, I then pasted the following into my .htaccess file at the root level of the website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

These rewrite conditions above effectively rewrite all the blog files to the root level of the website.

To get the labels that are in Blogger to automatically redirect to the categories in WordPress required the implementation of a couple of special things. I suggest you read Alistair MacDonald’s article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. It wasn’t absolutely necessary that the old labels be exactly the same file names, but I wanted the old label files to be redirected or renamed to “category” names.

The archive files were similar to the label files, in that they also needed to be redirected to the proper areas regardless of the file names within links online or the search engines. While the posting file names were important to remain the same, due to the number of postings I had online, I did not think it was quite as important to have the archives and the categories match exactly to the old file names.

Using the procedure on the .htaccess files I learned from Alistair MacDonald, I did the following. I first created an empty labels and archives folder (directories) in the root level (public_html area) of my website because that is where the original ones were stored from Blogger FTP. Before I created those folders at the root level, I changed the original folder names that still had the original Blogger written files, to labels-o and archives-o. Now that I had my empty folders, I then created separate .htaccess files and placed them into the previously created labels and archives directories using my cPanel File Manager. Once those were created, I then placed the following modified code for my website that Alistair had first written.

Labels: Here is what I added to the labels .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.(.*)?$ category/$1/ [R=301,L]

What this does is basically changes any labels file that someone clicks on online, and converts it to a category file at my WordPress blog.

For example the following link: http://jimwarholic.com/labels/apple.php, becomes: http://jimwarholic.com/category/apple when clicked on.

Archives: Here is what I added to the archives .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_(.*)$ /$1/$2/ [R=301,L]

What this .htaccess file does is take the year and month of the archives and rewrites them to the root level with the following format: http://jimwarholic.com/2007/06. Notice that the archives file does not have the ending .php file name as the Blogger FTP published files, because WordPress creates the archives files by default with no file type at the end.

I also redirected the old RSS and Atom subscript feeds to the new feed file format.

RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]

At this point in time, I was ready to write this blog posting.

By the way, I also imported some blog postings from another blog I had hosted in another subdirectory on this domain name. It was a smaller blog, with less postings, but I also did some special .htaccess file creation over at that other directory to redirect those postings directly here.

Yes, there are a few more template customizations that I intend to do for this WordPress blog but for the most part, I think I got it the way I want. I have also loaded some cool WordPress plugins that are really helpful for doing some special functions. I’ll have to write another posting on those a bit later. Feel free to tell me what you think of my new blog layout and post your comments here. You may also post your how-to questions here or send me an email.

I hope this has been beneficial to anyone looking for the procedure on how to convert from a Blogger FTP published blog to a WordPress self hosted published blog. While this information is mainly to convert to WordPress from Blogger FTP, most of the information can also be utilized in the future for importing postings from other blogs to a WordPress blog. Besides that, I can refer to this information myself in the future. Reference notes are always nice to have. Online blogging after all, is much better than taking notes the old fashioned way, and helps everyone find the information out semantically too.

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Regards,

Jim

PS If you come upon any glitches in my site, please let me know. Thank you very much for your input.

Permanent Link to: Blogger to WordPress Conversion FTP Migration Procedure

Pictured below are the capacitor locations and values for Apple iMac G5 iSight Mother Board 820-1766-A motherboards.

For high quality, low ESR, computer and switching power supply grade, long life, high temperature rated, and high current rated capacitors, go to www.jwestsales.com, your source for the Apple in you.

Note that there are at least two different iSight G5 models with different logic cards. Take a look at this one to confirm which model iSight you have.

Click the following link to purchase the iSight Mother Board Capacitors Kit.

Here is a down-loadable procedure for G5 iSight dis-assembly which can take you all the way down to and including the iSight motherboard removal.

Regards,

Jim Warholic

Permanent Link to: iSight G5 Apple Mother Board 820-1766-A

Deflationary forces and technology improvements in the computer industry have resulted in significant savings to be realized in hardware storage devices. The one terabyte hard drive would have sounded like something out of the “X Files” just 10 years ago. Now, check out some of the great prices on: 1 TB External Hard Drives.

These USB external hard drives can be used in both a PC world and the Mac world for key backups of your system. What would you do if your computer went down? What if your hard drive were to die on you, would you be lost? Would you lose it all?

If you haven’t done a backup of your system yet, I recommend it ASAP. Be prepared is the Boy Scout motto, and now is the time to do it before your system puts you in a bind.

This is your insurance policy to keeping your pictures, documents, files, applications, and complete software system backups up to date for your future computer health and welfare.

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Permanent Link to: Great Prices on External Hard Drives