Halle’s Smooooth Words o’ Wisdom

I upgraded the blog today to WordPress 2.6.3 today and all went well. Woohoo. The best part is that I also installed the WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin so that future upgrades will be a cinch and white-knuckle free for this photographer.

Today’s Wordpress upgrade from 2.3 to 2.6 went off without a hitch. It’s theme change time. We’re looking for something with room for photos. This minimal theme’s called Journalist. We kind of like it…

Resource Revival updated their site. Check it out!

Recently I discovered an inordinate number of pings on 3 comment sections of our nearly 2 year old wedding planning blog. Michelle and will be married 2 years this September. I hadn’t touched or thought much about the blog in as many months. Who bothers with a wedding planning blog once betrothed? The blog was mothballed and only recently did it come under comment spam siege. Seems a gaggle of bots zeroed in on 3 posts and within a 4 month period posted almost 100,000 spam comments. The blog ran on Wordpress 1.5 and comment spam protection was minimal. Akismet had yet to arrive.

At least on a Mac in 2007 it is. I just canceled my subscription as I couldn’t get it to work with 4 different browsers running Max OS X 10.4.9. The customer service rep in Concord, CA was very helpful and said, “We’ve been getting a lot of these calls.”

It’s worked in years past no problem. I long for the golden age of internet baseball radio when you could listen for free to Expos simulcasts in French. Seems that while the price has risen quality has decreased. Funny that.

The famous ‘5-minute’ Wordpress installation this time took me a day and a half. Ooops. Prior to installing WP 2.1.3 I forgot to check whether or not my site and blog were hosted on a server running MySQL 4.0 or greater and PHP 4.2 or greater. There was a MySQL incompatibility unfortunately. I realized this after loading WP 2.1.3 and running the WP intsall script. To my chagrin I received an error message that said the server’s version of mysql wasn’t compatible with Wordpress. I hate when that happens.

I spoke with my webhost and they informed me that I needed to migrate my data from a Shared-Server to a Grid-Server. Apparently Shared-Servers have problems with resource hogs and Grid-Servers have largely solved the resource hog issue.

The next step was to modify the DNS zones for the server transition. It took 12 hours for the DNS zones to modify. Once that was done all I had to do was click a button and migrate my data. My host only allows data migration between 6pm and 6am.

So I waited 13 hours for the DNS zones prep and then last night around 7pm migrated data. After that I ran the WP upgrade script. Everything worked out peachy creamy and Halle’s Smoooth Words ‘O Wisdom is up and running again. This time powered by WP 2.1.3.

Yeeemotherbleeepinghaaaa.

This afternoon I noticed that updates to my blog feed were not appearing in NetNewsWire, an app I use more and more. So I cruised my blog in both Safari and Firefox and realized that when I clicked on the RSS button in each browser’s address window that my feed wasn’t working. Uh oh. First thing I did was to check my Wordpress Dashboard and Options. Nothing was obvious to this non-code writer so I exited the admin panel and started clicking through my blog to see if anything else was fubar.

I found that comments weren’t working either though old posts did list the actual number of comments listed at the top of each post.

It was time to reach Haller. He quickly deduced that he needed to:

1. create an .htaccess file
2. make it writable by the server
3. and then update the permalink structure

I’m not quite sure yet what most of that means but me blog is back in business. As always, thanks e. See you Tuesday night.

I attempted to upgrade from Wordpress 1.5.2 to 2.0.7 this morning. Things didn’t work as planned unfortunately. This was my second time upgrading Wordpress. Thankfully e was online and able to help out.

It turns out that the superlative Akismet comment spam blocker tripped me up. Not the plugin itself but the fact that I should have deleted the old version that I used with 1.5.2 because 2.0.7 comes with a newer version. The trouble, *I Think*, was that the old Akismet plugin was running with and tripping up the 2.0.7 version of Wordpress.

Thanks again for the help sorting this out Eric!

I just downloaded and installed the Akismet plugin on this here blog and it seems to work very well. It corrals suspected comment spam and then allows you to delete as many spam comments as you wish with one click. Works for me so far so good! This sure is a comforting message, “You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. :)” Must be Akismet working some vooodoo.

In order to install the plugin you need an API key which can be had once you start a Wordpress.com blog.

I downloaded a new Wordpress template, Connections, for the blog yesterday from Patricia Muller at Vanilla Mist. I dig her design though must tweak it a bit to better suit my needs. The first tweak was to add one of my photographs, a view of the north side of Dome Peak in the North Cascades, to the header. The first problem was that the photo didn’t fit correctly. Oops! Easy Cowboy. The second problem I encountered was that my photo obliterated the cool header tabs though the carnage was not as bad as it seemed. The text links still appeared but no longer as tabs. That’ll have to do for now.