Mar
29
Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade
Filed Under Wordpress | 5 Comments
After some testing on some of my less-popular blogs I’ve upgraded this one to Wordpress 2.5. The whole ordeal seemed fairly painless (although with the number of blogs I host I really should consider WPMU).
I use svn to manage my installations which makes it really simple. If you’re considering an upgrade, these are the steps I followed:
- Make a backup of your current data–can’t be too safe. Export your current database & php.
- De-activate current plugins
- change to the root directory of your blog and execute:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/- I had an issue with Akismet, so I also then did:
- rm -r wp-content/plugins/akismet/
- svn up
- visit http://your-site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php
- re-activate plugins
- Done
I want to congratulate the Wordpress team for a great release. Thinks look really sharp this time around and there look to be a lot of UI improvements. I’m also glad to see I didn’t have any issues upgrading like I did after the early 2.2.x series.
I post tutorials very regularly on this site. You may want to consider subscribing to the RSS feed. Or if you'd prefer these tips sent to your inbox you can use Email Subscriptions.
Jan
30
OpenID re-activated
Filed Under Wordpress | 5 Comments
After a few updates on the plugin that I’m using and a bit more testing I have re-activated the OpenID plugin for Wordpress. If you’re an OpenID user please let me know if you run into any issues. I have tested with my identity and it seems to be working well enough..
If you haven’t yet started using OpenID you may want to take a look at:
Oct
24
Ok, some of you might notice a small hiccup in the blog-time continuum. This is because I reverted to a backup earlier in the day after rebuilding the database from a fresh installation. What a pain, let me tell you. If you notice anything weird about the blog please let me know. From my testing I wasn’t able to find anything. This *should* be a good, working, fresh copy of the blog now.. I hope.
How Did I Fix It?
- I installed a new blog from scratch at a separate location using the latest version of Wordpress.
- I used the Manage > Export feature within the original Wordpress to export the posts, comments and categories.
- I used the Import > Wordpress feature within the new blog to pull in the posts, comments and categories.
- I verified functionality, manually updated the blog name and URL, etc (mainly a few things on the options menu)
- Exported the new database via phpmyadmin and saved it to disk.
- Opened the .sql file with vim and did a find/replace to update the new blog url for the original (ie; :%s/zelut.org/ubuntu-tutorials.com/g)
- Verified the ’siteurl’ value and ‘home’ value both matched the original site URL address.
- Threw out the original blog via phpmyadmin by selecting the database, ‘check all’ on the tables and selecting ‘drop’.
- Imported the newly exported and updated database to overwrite what was just dropped.
- Log back into the original site and the blog should be functional.
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE RECENT BACKUPS IF YOU ARE GOING TO FOLLOW THESE STEPS. STEP 7 WILL WIPE OUT ALL DATA FROM YOUR CURRENT BLOG. PLEASE UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LOST DATA. THIS IS MERELY THE STEPS THAT I TOOK AFTER NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A SOLUTION ELSEWHERE. ALWAYS KEEP REGULAR BACKUPS OF YOUR BLOG!
Sep
25
For those that have been following the up & down of the blog today I finally was able to get rid of the errors… by basically completely wiping out everything I had and starting over. You’ll notice the theme is default, minimal plugins are installed, etc.
I’m going to have to spend some time this evening updating back piece by piece. Until then, the blog should work it just looks a bit different. Hopefully I haven’t lost anything else critical!
Jul
23
Quick Blog Feature Update
Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment
Based on the general feedback last week on spam filtering for Wordpress I have removed the Math Comment Protection plugin (caused problems, errors for some users) and implemented the Bad Behaviour plugin. From what I hear of Bad Behaviour it sounds like it should be able to replace some of the existing plugins, but we’ll see how things go. If you are unable to access the site after this change (granted you can’t read this if that is the case) please let me know (try to change browsers, etc). If it does end up blocking users we’ll see what we may have to change.
Thanks — I’ll have more updates about Ubuntu Live later today.
Jul
18
Wordpress Spam Filtering
Filed Under Wordpress | 11 Comments
Does anyone have any good tips on filtering Wordpress comment spam? Right now I have four filters built in, which is stopping boat loads of spam. Are there any plugins the community might suggest that can help filter outside of what I already have?
Math Comment Protection (recently enabled)
Thanks.
Jul
15
Wordpress plugin: Sociable
Filed Under Wordpress | 2 Comments
I’ve noticed more and more blogs using the Sociable plugin lately and so I installed it myself. As the internet and browsing seems to be moving more and more towards “social browsing” I think it’s a great extension to have.
Basically the sociable plugin allows you to append your posts (as well as pages, archives, searches and single-pages) with selected links to social browsing sites. You can easily submit a post to sites like Digg, Fark, del.icio.us and many more. If you’d like to add this to your blog simply grab the sociable plugin. It’s really easy to install.
Feb
9
Internet Exploder saves the day?
Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment
Well in an unexpected turn of events Internet Exploder actually helped me find a very minor mistake in the site-content.
In the previous post I complained about Internet Exploder not displaying the page correctly. Well it turns out it was my lazy editing of the code that caused it and the other browsers (Firefox & Opera) just didnt care enough to alter the display. Searching thru it we found the solution, which was my mistake.
I never thought Id say this but Thank you Internet Exploder. You saved my website yeah, I feel a little dirty too 
Feb
9
Internet Exploder
Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment
For whatever reason (and trust me Ive been trying to solve it all day!) Microsoft Internet Explorer doesnt load our page correctly. Ive tried just about everything I can think of but in the meantime, if you want this to display at its very best, I suggest downloading Firefox to use as your browser.
You can read more about Firefox here or download it directly here.
UPDATE: Doing more testing shows that Opera also displays everything correctly, even when identified as Internet Explorer.
Feb
9
After trying this out for a few days & moving over a few other sites I’ve decided to make Wordpress my blog-of-choice.
I host a blog for my mom & after transitioning her from b2evolution to Wordpress she is very impressed. Its much simpler for her to use too and the skins… the skins are beauties.
If you want a blog check out Wordpress or contact me and I can help set you up.
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