What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
Details and updates about the mechanisms behind this weblog.
OK, the new version of WordPress is going to get me into trouble. I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss.
OK, the new version of WordPress is going to get me into trouble. I’m having entirely too much fun playing with the new features, and finishing out the last few things that hadn’t made the transition. (I think on the public side, I’m 100% done. Still a couple of tweaks on the admin side, to make writing posts a little easier by bumping up the font size and so on for the editing form.)
At any rate, I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss. Bye!
The “WordPress upgrade instructions”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress are pretty good, but they left out at least one recommendation I wish I’d heard before I got started.
The WordPress upgrade instructions are pretty good, but they left out at least one recommendation I wish I’d heard before I got started:
Take screenshots of the current version of your weblog!
Once you convert to version 1.5, you won’t be able to view your old version any more. But if you are planning on keeping the same visual design, with the very significant reorganization (and improvement) of WordPress themes, you will have to make a lot of little changes in a lot of different places. How will you know if the new version successfully replicates the visual design of the old?
Continue reading “Lessons Learned Upgrading to WordPress 1.5”
I found myself unable to resist the draw of the cool. I had to go and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.
I found myself unable to resist the draw of the cool. I had to go and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.
Took me a little over an hour to do the majority of the work. I think most things work now, even if it’s not exactly completely the same as the 1.2 version. I still have a few plug-ins to add and test, and then add to the templates, to get everything back to where it should be. But all the hard stuff is behind me.
Let me know if anything seems wrong…
As I have been working on this site, I’ve visited quite a few other weblogs run by WordPress, and occasionally see something that I’d like to know how to do myself. A little widget here, a list of related posts there, etc. Cool things, but nothing that says how to do them. So, if anyone ever has that thought about _my_ site, here’s the info. (Hopefully other WordPress users will do this for their sites.)
As I have been working on this site, I’ve visited quite a few other weblogs run by WordPress, and occasionally see something that I’d like to know how to do myself. A little widget here, a list of related posts there, a cool show/hide trick somewhere, etc. Cool things, but nothing that says how to do them. So, if anyone ever has that thought about my site, here’s the info. (This is really of interest to WordPress users only, but hopefully it’ll be useful, and other WordPress users will do the same.)
2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this blog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.
2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this weblog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.
For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.
That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.
I’ve run into a slight problem with the Staticize caching plug-in I was using to speed up WordPress on this site. It seems that $post->post_date isn’t correctly calculated on cached entries, even when you put them “outside” the cached page, and this screws up the time display on individual entries.
I’ve run into a slight problem with the Staticize caching plug-in I was using to speed up WordPress on this site. It seems that $post->post_date isn’t correctly calculated on cached entries, even when you put them “outside” the cached page, and this screws up the time display on individual entries.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday working on a few last lingering details for this site. The main changes I wanted to make were to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (a minor security update), make sure I was using the latest version of the Kubrick template (I was), and most importantly, fix the problems I was having with the Kubrick comments form.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday working on a few last lingering details for this site. The main changes I wanted to make were to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (a minor security update), make sure I was using the latest version of the Kubrick template (I was), and most importantly, fix the problems I was having with the Kubrick comments form, which is a lot cleaner and nicer than the standard WordPress version.
This evening I looked at this site’s error log, and found old URLs that no longer worked. And fixed most of them.
This evening I looked at the error logs for this weblog, and found a bunch of URLs for the old weblog, which didn’t work on the new one. I added a half-dozen mod_rewrite rules, and I should be handling almost every old URL now.
There’s one last format, for the channel-specific RSS feeds, that I’ll fix tomorrow evening, but I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone other than me uses them anyway, so it might not make a difference.
The other thing that’s definitely not working is comments. I don’t turn them on for every posting, but even on the posts with comments enabled, they’re not showing up. For some reason PHP will not include the wp-comments.php file where it’s supposed to, and so none of the comments displaying or form code is being run.
I have turned on comments for this post, in case any readers have ideas for how to solve the problem, but…
One of the funny things about converting from one weblog system to another was that I discovered a bunch of old posts which never got, well, posted.
One of the funny things about converting from one weblog system to another was that I discovered a bunch of old posts which never got, well, posted. I had them saved as drafts, but the old system didn’t show drafts in a pending section, so if I forgot to actually publish, they would eventually roll off my screen entirely, to be forgotten.
The new system makes it really obvious when there are drafts sitting, waiting to be completed. So, I’m going in and finishing them up, and then publishing them on their original dates. This means that you won’t see them unless you scan back (way back) in time, or run across them in a search. But who knows, maybe Google will pick them up and funnel someone to them someday. Worth getting online, anyway, if only to get them out of the Drafts bin.
I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.
“LTFP” was an acronym we used at Cymerc, the dot.bomb I worked at for 14 months before it imploded. We started using the term a couple weeks before we released the first version of our public web site. It stood for Launch This Fucking Pig, which basically meant we thought it sucked but were tired of testing, and just wanted it out the door.
LTFP is what I did very early this morning.
I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my Mac OS X system, setting it up, configuring it to use the same URL scheme as my old weblog system, tweaking the template a bit, and — most importantly — importing all my old weblog posts from the old system. After four weeks of dithering and obsessing, it’s not done, but it’s going live anyway.
I’ve tried to not break any permalinks to pre-existing posts or the syndication feeds, and otherwise keep it compatible with the bookmarks that people may have for this site. But I’m sure there will be a few things to fix. Leave me a comment if you find something.
There’s also plenty to do on cleanup. I will probably have to edit every single post to clean up the HTML and re-link the URLs I included in old posts. And I’m not terribly happy with the design of this template, which is pretty basic, and virtually unchanged from the generic version of Kubrick, which I used to get started. It’s a great template, but there are well-understood steps I still need to take to make it my own…
Anyway, by switching to WordPress, a much more popular weblogging system, I should be back to posting regularly, as the system will get in my way a lot less.
OK, this time I really mean it, I’m back online with this weblog.
I have finally managed to get this weblog going again. I had a fair amount of weirdness associated with the migration from my old computer, and decided the “easiest” way to solve the issue was to change to a new weblogging system. I’ve been wanting to upgrade the capabilities of this weblog for a while, so it seemed like as good a time as any, and a better reason than I usually have.
So, after evaluating Textpattern and WordPress, I decided on WordPress. I actually like many things about Textpattern better, but the approach it uses for categories made it virtually impossible to get working with my old blog structure. WordPress, on the other hand, works exactly the way I want when it comes to categories. So here I am.
Now, let’s see if I can start writing regularly again!
Problem: For some reason, even though your PHP include_path does contain the location of your include file, PHP cannot seem to actually include() the file. The paths match exactly, and yet you still get errors.
Back on the air. I’ve been in the process of switching from my old QuickSilver G4 desktop to the new PowerBook, and when I took the old computer offline, I locked myself out of this blog. I actually run the editing client on my personal computer, but have a read-only version on the FreeBSD server that actually makes it public. So, when I took down the old computer, the site was still online, but not editable.
Getting the editing client running again was a fair amount of trouble. First there were all the code files to move over and into the right place. Then there was configuring Apache and PHP correctly. Then I needed to allow access to the database server from the new machine.
And then I got stuck. On the same problem that stuck me three years ago when I moved onto the QuickSilver: I could not include() in the code files for the blog. Or any files, for that matter.
Finally tracked down the problem, a teensy little thing, that I’m sure I’ll forget again by the time another three years goes by, and it’s time for the next new computer.
So, in the hopes that Google will find the answer when I try looking for it again:
Problem: For some reason, even though your PHP include_path does contain the location of your include file, PHP cannot seem to actually include() the file. The paths match exactly, and yet you still get errors.
Symptom: Trying to include() PHP code files into a main file results in errors like this:
Warning: main(include-file.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/main/file on line 18
Warning: main(): Failed opening ‘include-file.inc’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/Users/username/Library/WebServer/…:/Library/WebServer/…’) in /Users/username/Sites/blog on line 18
Answer: You are keeping the include files in a location inside your own home directory (~/Library/... here). The permissons on ~/Library are no access for group and world. So the web server process cannot access them — even though the actual include directory has correct permissions.
Resolution: chmod go+rx ~/Library