andysaks

Hi – I can’t do the JavaScript myself (that’s why I got the plugin!).

The link is: http://www.sparkpresentations.com/covidien

The password is “covidien”

I’d like to change question 2 (“How many staffers are long-time trade show veterans…”) from having a text box for answers to having fill-in-the-blank percentages.

Thanks in advance for your help —

Andy

Hi Don –

Follow-up to Bulk Import project:

Bad news: The txt file with the ~70 redirects I bulk imported to your plugin didn’t work. I created the string of old and new links in Excel and output to a txt file, opened in Apple’s TextEdit, visually they looked perfect, exactly matching your formula. I uploaded them to your plugin and got a successful upload message, BUT they didn’t appear in the redirect list, and all the ones I spot checked didn’t work.

I tried again copying and pasting a new text editor called TextWrangler, and each time the editor froze when I saved the txt file. I tried all kinds of things, like making sure I wasn’t exporting Excel formulas but had the real values in there, even entering just one redirect as a test, and nothing stopped the freezing problem.

I’m still wondering what I did wrong…? The only way I see to create a txt file that might work is to copy and paste each link from Excel (or wherever) manually, and if you’re going to do that, you might as well just copy and paste them directly into the plugin manually.

Good news: Finally I just entered all the redirects directly into the plugin manually, they all worked, and it only took about half an hour.

thank you again for the plugin, still hoping I can conquer this problem for future projects —

Andy

Hi Don,

Thank you so much for your very thorough explanation and very quick posting, I deeply appreciate both. It’s obvious you’re very responsive to your plugin users.

I read through your explanation and it makes a lot of sense. Your sample and explanation in the plugin made it sound much more complicated to me than it really is.

Partially it’s because I think I misread the top line “redirect|destination|0|1” as a line of code that had to be inserted with each redirect, rather than a model to follow. Partially it’s all the “0|1” codes at the end of each line that I didn’t end up needing, and you advised against using. Partially it’s using terms like “PIPE” without a quick definition in parentheses or link to a page that defines it. I couldn’t keep up.

Also, it might be easier for newbies like me to interpret your instructions by ourselves if you could use SnagIt or similar app to circle each segment of the code in red and write its explanation in text nearby, so we could look at the code and understand each elements definition and role simultaneously. I had a really hard time matching your explanation sentence to various parts of the sample code.

The thing that helped the most was suggesting I do a few one-by-one redirects and export the file to use as a model. Once I did that with five sample redirects it all made sense quickly.

It’s also worth mentioning that Apple has recently added TextEdit to its iCloud application suite and in doing so seems to have removed the txt format as an option, I couldn’t find it. The only way I could open a txt file in TextEdit was to Export my five sample links from your plugin and open the txt file I downloaded from you.

I wondered if you could work in Excel too and save as a txt file from there, and if so, how you’d arrange each redirect in each cell (i.e. all redirect instructions in a single cell, or old slug in one cell and new URL in cell below, or something else?).

Anyway, thanks again for your quick help, I’m going to attack this in the next few days and will yell if I have any more questions. Great plugin!!!

Andy

Thank you for the quick response and the clarification!