Tag: wordpress

New Web Hosting

This is the first proper post on my blog since December 2009, or May 2018 if you count the recipes posts I imported from a separate blog earlier this year.

After 14 years of hosting with Hostgator I got fed up with the sky high renewal fees of 172 USD, about 150 GBP not including the currency exchange fee from the bank.

Last year after I renewed the hosting with Hostgator I decided that would be the last time and that I would find hosting someplace else. That gave me a year to sort out my blogs and other websites I run.

With a new resolve, and a deadline, I started by reorganising my blogs. The first thing I did was to get rid of the recipes blog and import the posts into the main blog. I then moved the JavaScript section from the main blog onto a new site.

Next I started working on Linux Links. I had originally built the site from scratch but now I wanted to move it into WordPress. The first task was to export the data and import it in to WordPress, which to be honest was quite easy! The next step was to get the new site running exactly like the old one but by using WordPress functions.

To be honest I haven’t quite finished Linux Links, the front end works as I intend, but I still have to finish off an admin section I added.

With the change to a new host I could also publish a new site, Bristol’s Lost Pubs, I had been working on this for a couple of years after the original site closed down.

Here is a list of all of my sites.

And with that my new hosting is OVH. Welcome.

Upgrades & Updates

Has it really been a month since my last post!?

Since then and now, Christmas and then the New Year has been and gone. All the turkey has gone and the Christmas chocolates have been eaten, and the last few Christmas nibbles and pickles are still being shared around!

My sister has moved out and is renting a place with her boyfriend. We’ve not noticed much difference, because before she was hardly home anyway!

 
Last week my trusty 17 inch monitor gave up the ghost, so I had to make do with an old CRT while my new 19 inch wide screen monitor was delivered. Interestingly, the screen is just a little shorter than the old one, but boy, does the width make a difference! 1440×900 pixels baby!

Also, after a forced upgrade to my monitor, I also decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my operating system. I went from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10 in a matter of two days!

After going down the doomed upgrade current installation path, I then tried the old delete-it-and-install-a-fresh route, and it worked!

But like all new things there were teething problems, I would loose network connectivity if I tried to assign a static IP address, but I had no problems getting onto the Internet if I used a dynamic IP address. I found a solution on the Fedora forum, which didn’t work, but I did find a solution that works.

I had another problem with Firefox, or more specifically with Fast Dial. When getting a website preview, it would cause the whole system to just hang.

My problem with Pidgin was solved by setting my public IP address, or I could of solved it by configuring a STUN server, strange how this didn’t affect the last version!

I still haven’t been about to mount CD’s, but I’ll work on that when I get more time, I just need to edit the fstab file, I don’t know why it wasn’t set automatically!

Other than that its been great, KDE 4 looks and works great, I’m still getting used to the changes, the main menu set up is a little weird, but it’s cool!

I have a spare partition on the hard drive which I was going to install Windows XP, but I might install another distribution I was looking at, Foresight Linux.

 
I have also updated my website, last year in December I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.7, and moved a few things around so that (eventually) the whole website (will) run on WordPress. The only two pages not currently running on WordPress is links and photos.

I have also updated the design, but there’s still a couple of areas that I need to sort out, like the home page, comments and the footer, but, overall I think the design is all finished, it’s not a complete redesign, but I think that it improves the overall look and feel of my site.

Has anyone noticed?

Lol if anyone is subscribed to my blog, then you may of recently received about 144 new emails from this blog.
That’s because when I imported all my posts in to my blog, I forgot to disable the Subscribe2 plugin!

Of course why!?
I have moved hosting, I am now no longer hosting my website and blog on Lycos webhosting, I have moved to Hostgator!

I was with Lycos for about six years, and three of them was using Tripod, Lycos free hosting!
I have been meaning to move hosts for a while now.

I have had no trouble with the service provided by Lycos, and the times I have had to contact their support I got quick answers!
But, there was some limitations with the way the server and PHP were setup.
For example, to get my blog working correctly I had to have two additional plugins. One of them changed the default compact WordPress rewrite rules to the verbose type.
And the second was to disable canonical redirects. The server was setting an incorrect $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] value, which sometimes caused some pages to time out with constant redirects.

I contacted their support staff and they said that they were unable to support a 3rd party product.
I installed their One Click Site install of WordPress, but it was version 2.3.2, which doesn’t suffer from the same problem. They told me that they had no plans to upgrade their version of WordPress.

I can’t remember where I heard about Hostgator, but so far its been good!
The control panel is a little confusing, but that’s only because I’m not used to it yet.
They allow you to have multiple databases, so I have separate databases for my blog, website, and linux-links.
I went with their baby package, which still works out cheaper than Lycos.

And the best bit!?
I have been able to ditch the two plugin’s, and all parts of my blog still work!
But I am still using Lycos to serve my domain’s from.

Finally Updated!

I must start this post with an apology to anyone who is subscribed to my feed!

Earlier today I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. At the same time I took the opportunity to clean out my database, quite literally I reformatted my blog!

This involved me exporting all my posts, and blogroll, deleting all WordPress files, apart from my theme and wp-config.php, and then deleting all the WordPress tables from the database!
Then I installed the new version of WordPress and ran through the install. I then deleted the test post, and updated some of the options. I then imported all of my old posts into the fresh install.

That was only this morning, now what have I been doing for the past two weeks since my last post?
The answer, nothing much!

The only notable exception is that I have finally got my new computer up and running!

I installed both Fedora 7 and Windows XP onto the first hard drive, Linux on 100Gb, and Windows on 60Gb.
I am using the 500Gb hard drive for all of my files, on Linux this is mounted as /home

The new computer is working brilliantly, and its so much quieter than my previous computers!
I’ve just got to get a set of speakers, and possibly a new heat sink/fan for the processor, and that will be it sorted!

It’s getting quite late now, so thats it for this post
Till next week!

Aimlessly Wandering the Information Superhighway!

The title just about sums up what I have been doing for the last three weeks since my last post, but more precisely describes what I did on Sunday!
I have a history list as long as your arm, and I have no clue about what I was doing!

But I have signed up for Gravatar, and have finally reported that bug with WordPress.

During the past month I have managed to do more work on the next version of Linux Links, I have most of the update working, and I’m just working on the Tag page. The next section I’ll be working on will be Search.

I am also working on the problem of how to make short unique URL’s similar to tinyurl.com
I’m thinking maybe put the md5 hash in a matrix table and add up every row and column, and then use that to make up some letters.
Yes, as you’ve probably guessed, I have no idea on how to go about it, and I don’t want to just use the id of the URL in the database

Other than that, nothing much has been happening, work is still the same, we’re starting to get in a lot of Easter eggs, which seem to magically disappear, must be due to the price! And there was me thinking that people would be boycotting Cadbury chocolate and not buying it!

Untill the next time
Enjoy your Easter Egg!

Edit: I have just been told that the price of Easter eggs in ASDA have gone back up to their original price.
I have also just installed the WordPress pluginWP_MonsterID, and have edited the blog theme, so if you are signed up to Gravator your avatar will show up, otherwise you get a random monster!

New Year, New Style!

Its the new year, and what a time to update my websites style!
A new year, a new style!
What do you think? Comments are welcome!

There may be a few issues, especially in browsers other than Firefox on Linux.
So if your using Internet Explorer, Opera or any other web browser on Windows, or Mac and you spot a problem let me know about them so I can sort it out. Thanks!

I don’t have any time to post any more as I should be on my way to my girlfriends by now, so I’ll post more details as soon as I can.

Until then,
Happy New Year!

Fix for wordpress breaking mod_rewrite/friendly URLs

If you’ve just upgraded WordPress and find that when you browse your blog your web browser displays the following message

“the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

To fix this all you need to do is edit one file in the WordPress installation.

The problem is due to the canonical redirection functionality, it redirects incorrect permalinks to their correct ones.

To disable that functionality edit /wp-includes/canonical.php and comment out the last line:
[code]add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);[/code]
change to:
[code]//add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);[/code]

Here’s the post on the WordPress support forum that details the problem and solution

This post was at first intended as a note to myself, so that in the future when i update WordPress and find my blog does an infinite loop then I can quickly change it.
I then decided to keep the post open, so that others with the same problem can quickly search and fix it!

Getting ready for nights!

From Sunday I will be working from 9pm to 9am for the next four days. This is to help with the refit that is going on at the moment.

It is 5 o’clock in the morning and I’ve been up for and hour now! I’m going to be going back to sleep, if thats possible, at 4pm and then waking up again at 10pm so that I can then hopefully stay awake all night!

I will be taking this free time as a chance to update my website as I have a list of tweaks and fixes to do.
One of them is a subscription to this blog so that casual visitors and readers can receive emails when I finally write a new post!

I have already added the plugin, subscribe2, to wordpress, and now I’m just testing it out with this post!

I’ll post again tomorrow night.
Until then, stay awake!

Nothing stays secret for long..

Nothing stays secret on the web for long
Ive been busily setting up my on blog on my website using WordPress, and importing posts from this blog using the RSS feed.

This morning i checked my emails and i had two emails from PHP Classes telling me that they had a trackback ping from my blog.
I’ve just looked in the 404 error database, and I’ve seen three different user-agent strings from bots that crawl blogs.
ping.blo.g
Blogslive (info@blogslive.com)s/2.0
Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-02.html )

Here’s the one from PHP Classes: httpclient (http://www.phpclasses.org/httpclient $Revision: 1.63 $)

I’ll make this “official” when I have the new site style up and running

Bye for now…