Interesting interactions between Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and Adium

Late last week, I briefly gave Facebook Chat’s Jabber support a try, since there are still a few contacts on there that don’t regularly run another type of IM. As I altered the groups of some of the contacts, I noticed that Adium seemed to be trying to set it on the Google Talk account instead. It seemed a little confusing, but no ill effects.

Strangely today though, I started receiving bounces to my GMail account:

Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Delay)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

uXXXXXXXXX@chat.facebook.com

Message will be retried for 1 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
DNS Error: Could not contact DNS servers

—– Original message —–

…
Subject: Brett Porter wants to chat

———————————————————————–

Brett Porter wants to stay in better touch using some of Google’s coolest new products.

…

Er, I want to do what?

I’m not sure if this is Adium messing up and trying to subscribe my Facebook contacts via Google Talk, or something intrinsic to how Jabber works with multiple servers, but it seems strange that Google would send out that sort of request on my behalf in this way. On the GMail interface you need to click through a few times to try and invite someone to Chat. I’d be interested in figuring out what is going on here.

Regardless, I’d already found that having all my Facebook contacts in my IM client at once is not really something I need and disabled the account. Besides, it was becoming disconcerting to see how much time my contacts (that aren’t using it from their IM) spent logged in to Facebook through the day!

Removing SPAM Comments From Old WordPress Exports

When it came to migrate my blog from an older installation of WordPress to the latest version on WordPress.com, I had a problem. The content export was 20Mb, but the limit was 15Mb. The cause was obvious – SPAM comments had filled up the old one (even though marked as SPAM, they are still exported), and until recently there has been no way other than modifying the database to get rid of them entirely. I had hoped to do that from the new system, but I couldn’t get past square one.

To resolve this, I put together this XSLT to remove SPAM comments from your WordPress exports:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns:wp="http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <xsl:template match="//wp:comment&#91;wp:comment_approved = 'spam'&#93;">
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="//content:encoded">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes" />
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:copy-of select="@*" />
      <xsl:apply-templates />
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Unfortunately, I had to manually go and fix some malformed comment HTML (or in the case of SPAM, just delete it) for it to work, since the XML wouldn’t even parse, but once that was done the result worked perfectly for the import. Then it was just a matter of cleaning up old blog links and some HTML that didn’t look quite right in the new template by searching within WordPress.

I hope someone else finds this useful!