Quick explanation for those of you who thought I had given up on posting here, or had no internet access – I am currently still deep in the process of setting up my other 18 sites. They were originally created as static (well almost, too long a story to recount here) pages, and whenever I needed to make amendments, it tended to take a long time. Deciding to swap hosts, I took the opportunity to also use WordPress as a CMS system for these sites. This has meant a fair amount of preparatory work; I am now manually importing each old article into individual blog posts, tidying up the strange snippets of code that snuck in here and there, and then finally tweaking the theme for each to get what I need. I’ve completed this process on about 1/3 of the sites, however in terms of work, I am only 1/5 done at max – some of the sites only have 50 or so articles to import, whilst the ones left are closer to 200 🙁
Anyway, once this process is complete, I’m hoping to start earning some money from them again (the reason they were originally created), and any future amendments will be a lot easier to carry out, be it on an individual page, or site-wide. Until then, this blog will continue to be updated less frequently. Sorry.
I still have a large back log of posts to write here, ranging from the ‘missing’ book reviews, last year’s Amsterdam trip reports, and a lot of Eating Out posts, since meeting Oz Dave, Chris2 and Eric.
Finally, although not as concrete as I originally hoped, a trip to Amsterdam and short time in Britain is still a possibility around my birthday (4/20 for any American schmokers reading this 🙂 20th April for anyone else). Since the ACD (Amsterdam Coffeeshop Directory) forums are still down, and Channels.nl is getting ever more full of trolls, I decided to source a new site for reliable information…
Virtual ‘Dam is looking good so far 🙂 (Nope, not another sponsored post, just happy to recommend the site to others interested in all things related to Amsterdam.)
Feb 13 2008
Sparse Posting
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Feb 13 2008
Randomness
As observant readers will have noticed, this blog has been missing a tagline§ since I moved hosts and reinstalled WordPress from scratch. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t decide which to use, having already cycled through a few on the old version of the blog. I am now trying out a new plugin (WP Random Tagline (I love plugin authors who name their code with a descriptive name, saves so much time when searching 🙂 )), and so each time someone visits a page on this site, they should see a new tagline at the top, just above where it says ChrisMerriman.com.
Now some people would say this does not help with search engine optimization, however 1) I’m mainly writing this blog for my own sanity, not necessarily to try and draw in a crowd of thousands 2) It is better than having none at all 😉
Anyway, the plugin automatically creates the required SQL table thingies, which is a relief, as this is one area I’m still a little hazy on.
§ – Thats the text you see next to many blog names (normally a short description/quote/explanation, as opposed to the site name itself)
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Feb 06 2008
WordPress 2.3.3 Released
I have just noticed the link in my dashboard, informing me that a security update has been released for WordPress. See the WordPress dev blog post on this subject here. Basically, a security flaw was discovered, where IF you had registration enabled on your blog, members could theoretically hack in and edit other people’s posts. Although this doesn’t effect this blog, (anyone is welcome to leave a comment, but no one can register), I’ll be uploading the new xmlrpc.php to my 20 blogs tonight, and probably update them properly to 2.3.3 tomorrow morning. As ever, head on over to the official WordPress download page to grab the latest stable release. (If you are looking for nightly builds, I doubt you need me to go digging about for the URL, I imagine it is imprinted on your brain already 😉 )
Anyway, if you have any friends with WordPress powered blogs (that is those who host their own files, and download the software from wordpress.org, not those who use wordpress.com services), do them a favour and drop them a line to give them a heads up on this update.
Jan 29 2008
Blog Revamp Completed
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.
Jan 25 2008
Work In Progress
I am way too tired to write a proper post right now, but this is just a short message to let people know that I have made some sizeable changes to this blog’s setup, and so if things look odd/don’t work in the next day or so, please do be patient.
Any old links to posts (both within this site and from external sites) are not likely to work, and if the layout or graphics seem odd, either clear your internet cache, press Ctrl+F5, or waiting for various DNS servers to stop flipping from the old server to the new…
Jan 15 2008
Problem Sorted
I am not publicly posting the solution that worked just yet, as I need to check any security implications from the action I took.
The short version is that I can now access the admin section of this blog.
Whilst I’m wittering on about things 98% of my readers couldn’t give a flying funk about, this site may experience limited downtime in the next week, as I’m intending to change my hosting company. Matt Garrett has very kindly been paying for my hosting, but it is time for me to take responsibility for my site’s costs. Short version is if the site is down, or appears screwed up, wait an hour, try again. If it still doesn’t work, wait a day, and unless I’ve fallen asleep at the keyboard, things should be fixed again.
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Dec 10 2007
Details Of Code Changes
As I mentioned earlier on, I have now instigated a few changes in the way this blog is coded, to enable WordPress to be upgraded to 2.3.1
As this blog has a few features that only are supposed to work within certain categories, I previously used the King Text plugin; with which you can easily stipulate exactly where the code should be run, and where it should be skipped. Unfortunately, using versions of WordPress above 2.1.3 would disable this plugin, and as no script bodges were announced that actually worked, this blog has been stuck without an upgrade for some time. Not only has this meant that some features (such as native support for tagging) have been unavailable, but also vital security patches were not applied.
Anyway, a fellow forum user (Sorensicai) over at PPP suggested using
if(is_home())
{ echo '//widget code'; }
as a way to manually force the site to only use scripts on certain areas. Of course you can change
(is_home()) for (is_category(CaTeGoRy%)) or whatever is required.
Anyway, I took the plunge, as I had not managed to break anything whilst upgrading my other WP blog to 2.3.1, and to my surprise it worked! Having had the shackles of the old plugin removed, I upgraded this blog, and updated a few other plugins, and did a little tidying up of some other code. I also realised I could move a lot of my current widgets from a specialist PHP Exec style plugin to a normal WP Text widget, as no fancy code was involved, just some images.
Anyhow, once I figure out how to call RSS feeds only within certain categories, and whether I can stack different conditions for different code snippets within one widget, I’ll be happy 🙂
Dec 09 2007
Blog Finally Upgraded
Long term readers of this site will know I have been unable to upgrade from WordPress 2.1.3, as I use a couple of plugins that do not work with WP2.2+.
I finally decided to try out a course of action recommended in a forum, which means I have now been able to uninstall the plugins, write the required code myself, and finally upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1 . Most users should not notice any difference, other than the fact that the righthand column has a few extra lines at the bottom.
I intend to write a post detailing the changes required, and why I needed them, later on when I get back to my own PC (currently at the in-laws).
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Dec 06 2007
Locked Out Of My Blog
This morning I was attempting to check how the site was doing, when I was presented with the following error
HTTP Error 403
Error 403We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for (ACTUAL URL REMOVED) on this server.
Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.
Your technical support key is: 59da-43a1-1366-73cd
You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.
If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact email at chrismerriman.com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.
I was just about ready to read the riot act to Megaline, explaining how they needed to ensure their customers did not partake in activities that would get IP addresses blacklisted, when I thought to Google the error…
It turns out there is a bug with Bad Behavior (one of my anti-spam plugins used on this site), and that this PC’s current IP address is not actually blacklisted (again confirmed after a little more googling).
Anyway, if you have been presented with the same error, head on over to the Bad Behavior update page, download the revised code, upload it to your server, and you should no longer find yourself blocked from your own blog 🙂
Nov 19 2007
Alex Confirmed As Safe & Sound In Oz :)
The title pretty much says it all. Although I had seen her on Facebook since her plane had landed, I managed to catch her on Messenger earlier this morning. All appears to be going well, and she intends to add a post to her Dryad Musings blog soon. There was one in the middle of composition, but her net connection died, and I didn’t manage to give her the following piece of advice before it occurred…
For anyone who finds that there internet connections dies after hitting save or publish on their blog, and so they think they have lost the post…
1) Wait until you have got a successful connection to the internet again – DON’T do ANYTHING in the browser window/tab that was being used for your post composition
2) Hit the back button in your browser
3) Hit the forward button in your browser, and when you get a warning re. POST data, click OK
4) Ta Da, data should be magically saved.
Of course you could just regularly save drafts as you write the message 🙂
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