I’ve heard from some late denizens of Opera Community that their migration went “eazy peazy”. That was not my experience, however…
#1 complaint: Blog posts were missing entirely from my feed in Vivaldi. I checked the XML file from MyOpera (23,000+ lines of code, mind you) to see if I could find some of the missing entries, and found a couple of them (wasn’t going to spend hours/days looking for all of them…), so apparently vivaldi.net just wasn’t importing them.
#2: MyOpera left the links to internal image files, so they did (misleadingly) show up in the reconstituted blog on vivaldi.net, but each entry with a link to an attached image file a.) each image had to be uploaded to the appropriate folder on Vivaldi, and b.) each image link had to be edited to reflect the new image file location. This has proved to be an exceedingly tedious and time-consuming process, and I was unable to complete the entire process despite working 10 to 13 hours a day for an entire week– and now that the corresponding blog entries have disappeared from Opera (and linked image files from vivaldi.net), remaining posts will have to be reconstituted by Braille using the old (MyOpera) image link addresses to find their corresponding image files (on my deskop).
#3 Photo albums were exported from MyOpera with numbered folders, and did not include the names of the albums they were exported from. Each folder had to be opened, and compared to the corresponding albums on MyOpera and renamed. Then they had to be uploaded individually, which created a host of new difficulties– e.g keeping the order of the original albums, etc. I found this to be an exercise in futility (for a variety of reasons), and decided to settle for an approximate chronological order for the albums.
Most of the preceding problems were as the result of Opera’s half-hearted effort to make people’s blogs & photography (in my case seven years’ worth of work) available for migrating. But, unlike WordPress’ blog migration support, it was far too inadequate to make this process anything less than painful.
Some problems with the vivaldi.net import will be explored subsequently. But I must say before I begin. The people creating vivaldi.net are obviously putting forth a valiant effort to make create a new community space from former Opera Community stalwarts. I doubt they have either the financial of manpower resources that were available to Opera, and in the short time that I’ve been following this process, I can already see where they have been making improvements & tweaks as everyone is scrambling to put things together in a new location.
Having said that, here are some problems that (I believe) need to be resolved:
1.) URLs are far too long and counter-intuitive. For example: my “start page”, the only page which includes my banner and profile photo, at this point only lists my forum posts, and my blog is shown in the left-hand sidebar as an “app”, which links to a kinda-sorta view of my blog in the center panel only a few (480, maybe?) pixels wide; and you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find a tiny link which reads, “https://vivaldi.net/blogs/blogger/listings/bad-blogger >” which leads to a view, minus the photo header, which I can identify as a regular “blog-view”, and my Blog Title “Bad Blogger” first appears (minus banner or profile photo). The URL reads
“https://vivaldi.net/blogs/blogger/listings/bad-blogger”
which is kind of hard to remember. And in view of the fact that Opera refused to offer a “301 Redirect” to my blog’s new location, it is impossible to direct a person to my blog using only Google and my blog’s title, as I could when
I was #1, DUUU-UDES! (it’s one thing to be one in a million, but how ’bout 1 in a QUARTER BILLION?)
Also, the fact that the words “Bad Blogger” do not appear in the title tag, seen here:
means that Google will probably not index my site as such.
2.) Some of my blog posts, which did appear in the XML file exported by Opera, did not however appear in Vivaldi, which creates TWO problems:
a.) I was trying to catch the missing posts as I came upon them in MyOpera, and took a screen shot, which included the date they appeared, but any posts I wasn’t able to get to before the blog was removed by Opera, must be located by other, more tedious, and roundabout means, and
b.) there is no way to re-enter them in the correct date order in Vivaldi. I am hoping this will be remedied at some point.
As I mentioned before, it has been nothing short of a heroic effort to get things to the point where they are currently, and I hope they will be able to maintain this platform for a while (I don’t know what sort of resources they have available for this endeavor). Also, the fact that they had relatively short notice to get this site up & running meant they didn’t have time to “reinvent the wheel”, and used a proprietary (albeit open-source) platform (Joomla) to get it up in a hurry, and they must deal with any limitations imposed by this platform. They’re doing a great job, and look forward to working with them in the forseeable future!
