Seems like there was some corruption in the WP database that began around when Bluehost reported a problem with my shared server. I ended up running a database repair that allowed me back into WordPress. I also had to add the WordPress modifications back to my .htaccess files. The .htaccess file settings were probably blown away when WordPress went into install mode after to corruption.

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To pick the PHP version on Bluehost click the PHP Config icon in the Software/Services section of Cpanel. The following options will be displayed:

Bluehost directs you to the PHP Migration Guide at php.net in the event you need to verify your code. In my case all my PHP was in WordPress or WordPress plugins. I had the latest WordPress version so I knew I was safe there. All my plugins are still actively developed and I had recent versions. So I should be all set with PHP 5, which is a good thing, since I really didn’t have anyway to test this unless I installed a whole new server. So I decided to make the change when things are slow and do some quick testing.

So I went from PHP4 to PHP5 (FastCGI) about a week ago and everything seems to be running just fine.

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I wasn’t looking for a theme to redo this site, but I was browsing through some Wordpress related blogs and came across the Redoable theme and it just caught my eye. The design was nice and clean and I liked it visually. But as I looked into it I realized it was more than just eye candy. It’s as well thought out technically as it is visually and it included a several features I was looking for,

Redoable is based upon the K2 theme so it has the features of K2 at its core, including asides, live archives, live search and sidebar modules. Of course, K2 baggage tags along - such as live search not working with the type of permalinks I use.

Redoable includes built-in support for 20 plugins (21 if you’re still pre-2.1 on WP). This includes Alex King’s Articles, Gregarious, Related Posts, Ultimate Tag Warrior, WP-PostViews, WP-PostRatings and more. I was looking at adding several of these to my blog so Redoable also became a time saver.

If you’re on Wordpress 2.2 you’ll need to disable widgets if you want to use the sidebar modules. The K2 support forum has a plugin that can be used to disable widgets.

The icing on the cake is that Dean maintains a forum to support the theme and his plugins. The theme had a few bugs but between the support forum and some digging they were easily fixed. There’s also some tweaking I want to do but the big changes are in.

I liked the Semiologic theme but one of it’s strengths was also a weakness for me. Semiologic was structured in a way that changes were kept in external files that were then read by the main theme files. This way when the theme was updated all the changes I made would stay in place. With Redoable (and almost all other Wordpress themes) when the theme gets updated I’ll have to redo all my changes (or figured out what changed in the theme an incorporate theme). This is a bit of a concern since K2 is the base and Wordpress has a more agressive upgrade schedule. It’s an incentive to learn how to create/modify themes.

The other downside is that I really like the colors used. This will be a problem if I want to make my site more unique by modifying the visuals. There’s already the ability to change the look a little bit but the biggest change is white design which isn’t my first choice.

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1. Search - Articles don’t appear in search results until I save them again. This is for both the search box on the website and the post search in the admin console. This is less of a problem for me than it could have been. I’m implementing tagging and have to clean up formatting on some articles so every article is getting saved again anyway. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with any plugins or the theme. As I write this the posts made before Jan. 1, 2007 won’t show in searches because I haven’t updated them yet.
2. Dean’s FCKEditor and Ultimate Tag Warrior plugins conflict - A web search shows I’m not the only one with this problem. With Dean’s plugin enabled the “pick-a-tag” feature on the write screen for a post doesn’t work. The suggestion button doesn’t work either.
3. TinyMCE (built-in editor) is haunted - The built in editor is causing me problems.
   1. At first the menu toolbar didn’t show and the visual editor didn’t show (I use Firefox). Clearing the cache and a browser restart seemed to fix the problem. For one post update. Then it returned. Clear the cache, OK for awhile but the problem returned. I finally started turning off Firefox add-ons. Since the problem would always go away for awhile it’s hard to be sure, but Greasemonkey seems to be the problem. Once the problem stays away for awhile I’ll start testing the specific GM scripts.
   2. On Windows it gets downright bizarre. For one blog TinyMCE works fine with Firefox. For another it fails to work on Firefox but does work in IE. It’s the same problem, missing menu icons and no visual editor.
4. Share This showing in Google index - “Share This” is a social bookmarking module that’s integrated with the Gregarious plugin. (Share This is also a standalone plugin.) I noticed that Google had indexed some pages and they would open with the “Share This” functions at the top of the page and not look at all like my site. On the website Share This uses ajax so it doesn’t appear as a web page. But I noticed some people complaining that clicking Share This (on other sites) resulted in a web page, not the expected ajax popup. The robots probably see this same page. Clicking the links in the Google index resulted in a page with the Share This options at the top and the page text down below. This resulted in duplicate content for Google and the Share This links don’t bring you to my site, they just display the Share This page. The Share This PHP module included the “noarchive” keyword for robots and in fact the Share This page was not cached. So I went in and changed it to a “noindex” keyword which should resolve the problem. I also submitted a deletion request for the eight pages to Google and we’ll see how that goes.

One problem was more than annoying. Clicking the tags in the post or in the tag cloud resulted in a strange selection of posts, most of which are empty while missing articles that should appear. There’s a conflict with the Redo-Recent-Links plugin (which is beta). I’ve hidden all the links and the tags worked properly now. Redo-Recent-Links allows the creation of a link blog within the main blog.

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As regular visitors to the site have already realized I’ve updated the site design. I’ll be making further updates for the next 24-48 hours. You’ll also notice that the formatting of some articles is strange to say the least, so I’ll be going through and cleaning them up.

Those of you who get the feed may notice old articles getting marked as new or updated. There’s no actual content updates. I’ll be implementing tags. Between the tags and the formating updates many articles will get touched.

I should probably fire my IT staff for coming up with this upgrade plan. But I can’t find anyone to work for less than nothing.

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There was really only one problem (at least that I’ve found so far). All of the text widgets that I used were removed. This happened on both my test blog and this one. Other widgets were unaffected, including a couple that are really just modifications to the text widget. On the other hand, all the text widgets on the Spam Chronicles survived the upgrade but I had problems with other widgets and some default widgets were put on the sidebar.. It’s easier to recreate the text widgets than it is to research the cause. Of course, it’s even easier to leave them gone. I’m planning yet another site redesign that eliminates widgets so I’m not bothering to put them back.

The biggest change iin Wordpress 2.2 is the inclusion of sidebar widgets which were previously implemented via a plugin. From the Wordpress notification:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

There’s also a significant change on the post write screen. In earlier versions the preview was below the edit screen and was updated whenever you hit save. Now there’s a link that need to be clicked and the preview is open in a new window (or tab).

Wordpress has stopped development on the 2.1 branch so this is a required upgrade.

I came across a couple of other things while testing the upgrade even though they don’t affect me.

• Since widgets are now included in Wordpress this causes problems with the K2 theme and themes based on K2. The Sidebar Modules are disabled after the upgrade. K2 has a plugin that disables the wordpress widgets. The link brings you to a forum, the first entry has the code and a link to the plugin.
• Tagging is not included in Wordpress 2.2 but it’s scheduled for 2.3.

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You’ll notice that the “OS News and Rumors” box that I mentioned here is now gone. When I added the YouTube videos here the formating of my site got all screwed up. Now, I had never embedded a YouTube video before so I did it on my test site first. It worked fine, no problems. I cut and paste into the production site and the page formating gets screwed up. After spending some time looking at the code in the posting I realized that I had installed the MiniPosts plugin in production but not in test. I had skipped test because at the time it was down while I was trying to get Wordpress 2.1.2 working. So I installed the plugin in test and sure enough, the same formating problems. I wanted the vides more than the mini posts so I deactivated the plugin.

If you’ve been here before you may notice that the links are gone from the left sidebar. They weren’t displaying, instead there was a SQL error. They worked fine in test. I even had all the same links. It’ll require some more research. So for now the links are gone with no eta on their return.

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I had installed Wordpress 2.0.2 through the Yahoo control panel. I’d been unable to successfully upgrade, just getting a blank page when running upgrade.php. I’d followed all the instructions from Wordpress for the upgrade. I’d assumed it was related to Yahoo restricting .htacess or a plugin they created to do permalinks.

But I tried one more time a couple days ago with the same result. I finally found this thread on the Wordpress support forum that had been posted two weeks ago.

In short, follow the documented procedures to upgrade. Before running upgrade.php do the following to wp-config.php:

1. Backup the current wp-config.php
2. Edit wp-config.php and remove the line “Define(’WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” (It’s not needed by 2.1)
3. Save the updated file and make a copy (you will need it later)
4. Edit wp-config.php and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password and save the file. Yahoo describes these here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/webhosting/mysql/mysql-09.HTML. If you don’t know the password you can go into “MySQL Database” section of the control panel and select Database Administrator. You can change the password here (if you’ve used the ID in any php scripts you’ll need to update the scripts.) If all you’ve used MySQL for is Wordpress you can safely change the password.
5. Now run upgrade.php. It should succeed.
6. Now replace the current wp-config.php (the one with the yroot account) with the one you saved in step 3.
7. Wordpress will now run

It’s recommended you check all your plugins for upgrades and do them at the same time. I upgraded my theme, deactivated all my plugins, upgraded the plugins that had upgrades, then upgraded Wordpress. Then I started the plugins one at a time to makes sure there weren’t any conflicts which is how I found the problem with wp-cache.

And to step back to the very beginning, use the “Wordpress Database Backup” plugin to create a backup. I did two, I saved one to the server and had one sent to me via e-mail. I then copied the entire blog directory down to my Mac. it was easiest for me to just suck the whole directory tree down, but if you have a large site you may want to just take the Wordpress files you’ll be deleting and replacing. (But don’t rely on your hosting provider to have a backup.)

I also upgrade my Tiga theme to 1.02 and upgraded the following plugins:
Askimet 2.0 (upgraded from 1.14)
Dean’s FCKEditor for Wordpress 1.3 (upgraded from 1.2)
Search Everything 3 (upgraded from 2.6)
Sidebar Widgets 1.21 (upgraded from 1..20060711)

There was also a newer version of the WP Cache plugin. But when I installed it the blank pages came back and I had to remove it and re-edit wp-config.php. The Wordpress forums implied this was probably a Yahoo problem. So it’s disabled.

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I just noticed that when a category list, or a days posting are displayed, there’s a “Previous” link at the bottom of the screen. Sure enough, it was a bad URL. It’s easy enough to see. Pick a catagory with a low count, scroll to the bottom and click the previous link.

I’m currently in the process of testing a new web host, with the latest Wordpress, and the latest theme and the problem doesn’t exist. There is not a previous link when there’s nothing else to see.

The problem is either caused by Wordpress 2.02 or Tiga 1.01 (the theme I use). It does not occur on my test site which was just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.2 and Tiga 1.0.2.

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On my list of things to do I was looking for a way to add short posts to this blog without clogging up the main page. I also wanted a quick way to do it since it wasn’t worth a lot of time to me. Some templates I’d looked at in the past had support built in, but there were other things I didn’t like about those templates.

First I looked at Sideblog but it didn’t work right away (using the widget - nothing was displayed). In the interest of my “quick” requirement I moved on after 5 minutes and installed the Mini Posts plugin which is widget based.

I liked the Mini Posts plugin although it had a few quirks I didn’t like. The postings ran together and it wasn’t possible to bold the date. So I prefaced each entry with a “*” and added a <br/> at the end to add a line feed. I also don’t display any of the post text as I didn’t like the way this looked. I could add a <!–more–> tag to each post to try and make it look better, but that was too much trouble. When I removed the post text I found that there wasn’t a “more” link so that the article could be opened and read, which is a problem. Creating an excerpt put the “more” back in even though the excerpt isn’t actually displayed, which was perfect.

The philosophy of Mini Posts is different than Sideblog. Sideblog is based on a category (or categories). With Mini Posts the plugin it’s necessary to mark the posts as a Mini Post. This can be done on the edit screen. It can also be done by scrolling through a posting list on the bottom half of the Mini Post options page.

Here’s the configuration configuration screen. This is the configuration I’m currently using, they are not the default settings.

Sideblog has a nice feature of being category based, and multiple “Sideblogs” can be used. I’ll be trying that one again once I upgrade Wordpress.

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I’ll still try to tweak things, but my apologies in advance if there’s a delay in seeing your comments, or the reverse, if a bunch of spam gets through.

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If you’ve been here before you know the site has a new design. I haven’t been happy with the categories and the way static pages aren’t included in searches. So I spent most of the weekend looking at and testing options, with a side quest into a failed Wordpress upgrade.

The bottom line on on the Wordpress upgrade is I think my ISP is doing something to prevent it although I can’t figure out what. Wordpress was installed by the ISP (I ran a wizard). While I could follow the Wordpress directions for the upgrade I ended up only displaying blank pages. So I bailed on that pretty quick.

I had been using K2 as my Wordpress theme and I really liked it. But as I looked at plugins and options for handling categories or tags it added a level of complexity. The plugins I looked at didn’t work right and my lack of knowledge of PHP and HTML made it tough to troubleshoot since K2 added a layer of complexity. Rather than try to edit the K2 PHP and CSS files I decided to look into simpler theme. While I still have to edit php and css files, I figured it would be easier if I could use the standard Wordpress documentation. I spent a little time at Wordpress’s theme respository and found Durable from Blaze New Media.

[Updated 10 minutes after the original post.] Figures, right after submitting this post I figured out that it was only my ability to save the colors as the theme default generated an error. Once I logged off everything worked. So if you don’t like these colors, head up top and click on “Options”.

I also added a plugin called “Search For Everything” that allows searching of static pages, comments, drafts, attachments and metadata. I worked fine with the K2 theme. As previously mentioned, it doesn’t work with the default search of the Durable theme but does work with the detailed search.

Visit my Durable page for info and links related to the Durable theme and my Wordpress page for info and links related to Wordpress and the plugins I use.

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• The Backup Project page was updated with the shortlist of software I’ll be evaluating.
• Added the following Thunderbird tip to the Cross Platform Apps page in the software zone:

  The Thunderbird spam filter must be trained after it’s enabled. This includes identifying both Spam and non-Spam messages. Select the message(s), right click and select Mark->As Junk/As Not Junk

• The Search page has a couple minor changes. The second Yahoo search box, that limited the search to specific sites, has been deleted. Yahoo has been indexing my site so the remaining box can be used to search this site (the search bar on the blog pages only searches the blog postings which is good enough in most cases). The Yahoo search will include the static pages (which is everything not on the Home tab) once they are indexed by Yahoo. When  I checked today it had indexed through my first posting on the 27th.

And finally, there’s a weekly summary over on the Spam Chronicles.

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Up along the top you’ll see a new tab called “Projects”. This is where I’ll be tracking some longer term endeavors. We’re kicking things off with two projects.

The first is “Spam” where I’ll be trying to reduce the amount of spam that gets to my inbox along with how various programs and service handle spam and how e-mail addresses can get in the hands of spammers.

The second is “Backup”. It’s time to review my current backup strategy and look at backup strategies for some friends and family.

And there’s some ulterior motives here. I’ve created a Spam Chronicles blog on the blogger beta to give it a workout and I’m trying various options in Wordpress to try and give it a workout to. (no longer there) I’m not much for evaluating software unless I can put it to real use.

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