Jun 19 2009

Hurricane With Windows Mobile 6.1

Category: Personal,Windows Mobile — ChrisM @ 1:17 am

For any UK readers, you’ll also find it listed as an Orange C550 (HTC often sell their models on via other networks, and so often each model has a lot of alternative names).

Anyway, despite the down direction on the joystick being a little wonky, since installing WM6.1, I’ve grown to like the phone again. I have learned that EITHER using WM5torage (a tool to enable the phone to be used as a mass storage device, thereby avoiding the need to install ActiveSync on a PC first) OR OMAPClock (a tool to overclock (or in my case attempt battery life improvement by underclocking)) on this particular model, with this particular ROM (selang09’s wm 6.1 – a breeze to install thanks to ubrdave’s helpful instructions here) caused some sort of corruption, leaving my phone convinced that all EXEs were not valid Windows CE applications! I’m assuming it was the underclocking that did it somehow. Anyway, lesson learned, phone NOT bricked, so re-flashed it, and carried on guessing what some of the included Chinese language programs do.

With 6.1 installed, I was able to start using apps that required .NET CF 3.0 or above, like PockeTwit, though live access to the camera does seem to not be possible – don’t know if this is a hardware limitation that the developers haven’t been able to work around, or whether this is related to the non-standard ROM I’m using. I’ve yet to try Barcorama on the Hurricane (a barcode scanner application), but I can imagine the ever present security guards in Kazakh supermarkets getting their knickers in a twist if I attempt any price comparisons/uploading 🙂

Here is a quick screenshot of how the phone looks right now, I miss the ability to easily add/remove components from the equivalent of the today screen, compared to the Kaiser with its WM6.1 Pro, but I haven’t yet had to fall back to my v.old Sony Ericsson K700, so I can’t really complain. Editing homescreens on WM2003SE involved plugins and XML files for the main config, so I’m hoping I can bluff my way through customizing the interface a little in the future.

Orange C550 HTC Hurricane Windows Mobile 6.1

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Jun 12 2009

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Problems

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:19 am

OK, problem sorted. I don’t know which of this site’s plugins caused this blog to be unable to automatically upgrade to WordPress 2.8, but after deactivating all of them, the process completed at the first attempt. Just in case this helps other blogs, if you currently have any of the following activated, you may want to disable them all, upgrade, and then obviously re-enable them. Akismet, All in One Adsense and YPN, All in One SEO Pack, Auto Thickbox, Broken Link Checker, Comment Referrers, DandyID Services, Different Posts Per Page, Easy IP2Country, Executable PHP widget, FeedBurner FeedSmith, Fuzzy Recent Comments, Google XML Sitemaps, MiniMeta Widget, MyBlogLog: Just for you, MyBlogLog Recent Readers Widget, No Frames, Revision Control, runPHP, ShareThis, Subscribe To Comments, Twitter Tools, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, WordPress Related Posts, WP-Blackcheck, wp-GotLucky, wp-headlineanimator, WP-o-Matic, WP Calais Archive Tagger, WP Calais Auto Tagger, WP Security Scan and finally Zap_NewWindow 🙂
You can now see why I didn’t follow the correct protocol (disable one by one) to discover which plugin was the naughty one 🙂 If I had to lay money on it, I’m guessing the No Frames plugin caused problems (I had already tried disabling the external WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but I have no proof whatsoever.

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May 28 2008

Sitemaps For Blogs

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 12:22 am

If you are currently looking at the range of sitemap generators specifically available for WordPress blogs, then I can recommend the (free) Google XML Sitemaps plugin – you can download it at www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator . In case you are interested/concerned, it does actually generate valid sitemaps that can be read by MSN, Ask and Yahoo as well, it was written back when Google originally came up with the sitemap standard, hence its name. Oh also, before I forget, if anyone else has had problems with the Bad Behavior plugin being deleted, when you attempt to auto-update from within a WordPress 2.5.x blog, you need to ensure the files are kept within their own folder, and that the old individual PHP file from older versions has been removed from the root of your plugins directory.

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Apr 09 2008

19-1 In Favour Of WordPress 2.5

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:27 am

As previously mentioned, I upgraded the test blog brother of this site to WP 2.5 recently, and other than a few small issues all went well. I therefore decided to take the plunge and upgrade a further eighteen of my sites yesterday. All seemed to go well, with no themes suddenly broken, and as I’d already tested their plugins on the test blog, no issues there either. The upgrade process went smoothly, though I did ensure I had both exported XML files for backups on each blog, as well as downloading the SQL table backups before starting each upgrade.
Now all I need to do is wait for the Random Tagline plugin author to not update his code (no response from e-mailing him, and the site appears to not have been touched in a little over a year), or just skip that and go ahead with upgrading this blog now. Can anyone else recommend an alternative to WP Random Tagline?

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Jan 29 2008

Blog Revamp Completed

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 12:54 am

So, the transfer process from my old host to this new one (Bluehost) is complete, and I took the opportunity to basically build this blog up from the ground again. With the amount of plugins I tested over the last 18 months, there was an awful lot of clutter left in the SQL tables, and I had experienced problems with the old host and their security updates. During the process of exporting the posts from the old home of the blog to this one (more on that later), I ended up losing the post numbers; where this post might have previously been something like http://www.chrismerriman.com/index.php/archives/2023 , it would now be ……/1926 .
As this meant that any deep links to specific posts from external sites were lost (and the number shift was not purely sequential, so no fancy redirect equations would work), I decided to change the fancy permalink strategy, hence this post can now be found at https://chrismerriman.com/blog-vamp-completed . This makes addresses a little more memorable, and possibly could improve this site’s standings with the search engines (once the bots have completed crawling around, finding the old content under it’s new addresses.)
Back to the export/import process. Ideally, I would have done this properly, but part of the reason for me moving hosts was that I was again unable to access the backend of this site – the admin section of wordpress. Without access to my plugins, I was unable to take a proper backup of the existing posts, comments, pages etc. Luckily, I had an 8 day old XML file that I’d exported as a temporary backup. However, I hit an unforseen snag when I attempted to import that file into this site – it was over 2Mb, and therefore exceeded the PHP restrictions in place. Rather than wait around for tech. support to confirm if they’d be willing to, at least temporarily, relax the limits, I decided to delve into the XML file and see what could be done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find 2.7Mb of data to drop, so I decided to try an experiment. Checking through the structure of the file, I kept the beginning and end of the file, then removed around 2/3 of the posts and comments. Saving the resulting file, this imported fine; I then kept the same empty structure, and inserted the middle 1/3 of posts & comments, to my surprise this then imported fine without wiping anything out from the previous import, and then the last 1/3 went in fine. Basically, I kept all the content bar a week or two, and I luckily still had the old site open in a different tab, so just needed to copy’n’paste that into new posts.
I decided to try a new theme for the blog, and also drastically cut down on the plugins installed, hoping it would speed up page load times, especially for first time visitors to this site. This seems to have worked reasonably well, and I repeated the process for this site’s brother blog (test.chrismerriman.com).
I’ve also completed some work on John’s new site, and started the process of converting my old niche article sites into blogs as well, but more on that later.

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