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 29 2008
Blog Revamp Completed
Jan 19 2008
John’s New Site Is Live
As you may remember, John had a blog hosted over at WordPress.com, however he needed a little more flexibility. Although the new site (www.CeltPhotographic.com) is currently simply a new home for the existing content, John hopes to use the site to primarily promote the actual photos he takes, with the blog posts being available as an ‘extra’ within the site.
As we both received a copy of the book WordPress for Dummies this Xmas, I’m hoping that between the two of us, we’ll be able to sort the site into something he would like. There are a couple of little problems with the theme he has currently chosen, with the Search box only displaying Sea for some reason, and the recent comments text needs sorting as well.
PS He also mentioned on Thursday that he liked the Green Day music I left round there, so now I’m just trying to imagine what a gig would be like with them and Hans Theesink combined 
PPS In case you didn’t guess, I’m hoping people will visit his site, and maybe leave comments on any posts/photos they like there.
Comments Off on John’s New Site Is Live
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).
Comments Off on Blog Finally Upgraded
Sep 20 2007
A Prime Example Of My Stubbornness…
The previous post took around 30 minutes to write, mainly because I was also doing a few other things at the same time. Having written the post, I hit the Publish button, and moved onto to clear down the work required on a few dozen other FireFox tabs, intending to return to the WordPress tab a little later.
For some reason I checked back on it before that. Lucky really – the post was lost, with a 406 error, I believe. Some issue with a suitable request not being issued or found… Anyway, simply returning back to the previous page just presented me with an EMPTY post page, with all my work missing. OK, so I’ve had similar problems before, clicked forward, and then F5ed, and the data has been re-posted correctly. So I tried this approach, unfortunately the same error returned. Before looking into this much further, I opened up Internet Explorer, and checked I could publish a test post there. (Didn’t want to do this within FireFox in case I cleared some sort of internal cache, and therefore lose all hope of recovering the work.) This new test post appeared fine.
I now had a choice, spend perhaps 10 minutes re-writing a post, as I still had the basic outline in my head, or… decide the PC was trying to annoy me on purpose, and rise to the challenge & beat the issue into submission.
Friends will not be greatly surprised to hear that I took the second route – and some twenty minutes later, recovered a version of the text, by sniffing the outgoing packets that were sent whenever I hit F5. Unfortunately the software I had installed to do this was rather rudimentary, with no filtering options, and as I had a lot of other pages loading and data being sent, it took a while to track down the right packets to analyse. Once I had searched for, and replaced, the silly codes (ASCII escape codes??), I had the post back again. OK, so it would have been simpler to just retype the thing, rather than start sniffing network packets, but it had been a while, and you can never tell when it might be useful 🙂
Then before this post was finished, we had a power cut. Luckily we have already replaced the last UPS we had, so I had enough time to hibernate the PC. The power came back 5 minutes later, the PC booted up, then decided it wanted to hibernate before it had finished booting. It hung for 5 minutes, before I hit restart. T.F. for FireFox’s ability to restore sessions when it senses your PC has become fubarred 🙂 Even our washing machine didn’t lose its programming, which was lucky, as I am doing some last minute washing, drying and ironing to get ready for Amsterdam and Britain. I’d already been delayed on that front by a few hours when our hot water went all orange again! Then Kara decided it was time to rid the shirt I am wearing of those evil adornments – buttons.
However, none of the above is going to bug me, I’m on my way to get severely relaxed, meet friends and family after a break of some 9 months, so I shall take it all in without getting too stressed. Oh, and Steve, a good friend from my Uni days back at Bournemouth has just got in contact through Facebook, my beautiful wife has just kissed me before going to bed, and I may even be in bed myself before dawns breaks, so the world could be in such a worse state for me right now 🙂
Comments Off on A Prime Example Of My Stubbornness…
Sep 14 2007
Happiness Engineer
If you think that title could be a label you are happy with, then check out Automattic’s current vacancies here. If you are more of a systems wrangler, fear not, they have a vacancy for that as well.
In case you are not familiar with the name, they are behind WordPress, the software that runs this blog.
The original Matt is the reason behind AutoMATTic’s name, I believe.
Aug 27 2007
(Free) WordPress Blogs Are Offline In Turkey
WordPress.com has been officially blocked in Turkey! Although that does not effect this blog, anyone who uses the WordPress server to host their own free blog will find that Turkish people are unable to access their blog! There are of course ways to circumvent this issue, however for the average Turkish internet user, any friends who have a WordPress hosted blog, will no longer be contactable via their site. For some background info from the man who actually created the WordPress software, check his post here.
This blog is not affected, as I only use the WordPress software on my own server, so the IP range that has been blocked does not include me. However, if anyone tried to reach John’s Blog, they would get an error message. Which reminds me – JOHN, WRITE A POST, IT HAS BEEN TOO LONG… SO LONG IN FACT EVEN YOUR BLOG IS COMPLAINING!
Jul 19 2007
Bad Behaviour Log Reader
OK, this is another post mainly aimed at WordPress and Stats junkies and/or geeks.
Bad Behaviour is one of the layers of defence I use on this blog against spam. It utilizes a split in the hyper-dimensional mandelbrot string sequence to detect malicious….
OK, no, if I’m being honest, I can not actually remember how it works it’s magic, but basically known bots, and (in)famous IP ranges that spamming PCs operate from are blocked, before Akismet even starts to check the content of comments.
Anyway, I had wanted to see what, or rather who was being blocked, but this meant trawling through MySQL tables, which even in my warped mind does not equate to a great deal of fun. So, thanks to the handy Plugins Of The Day list presented at the WordPress dashboard, I have found a plug in to check the logs more easily. See my Extras page for a link to the plug in.
Comments Off on Bad Behaviour Log Reader
Jul 14 2007
Design A Logo For A Moped Road Trip
If you remember previous posts I have made regarding a crazy idea to tour Austria in a moped (& a trailer!), you may well be interested in a contest the mopedist is running to design a logo for this activity. You can read more details on the contest at his blog, the rules are simple, and you could end up with your artwork being the official logo.
For any new readers, this is not a sponsored post, long term readers will remember the author of the blog I have linked to is the man behind one of my favourite WordPress plugins – WP-HeadlineAnimator. I’ve written this post in the hope of encouraging a few more entries to his competition.
Comments Off on Design A Logo For A Moped Road Trip
Jun 12 2007
Gwen arrives in her new home
Mum and John have just got their new puppy home. Gwen is apparently a real delight – she got John up at 4.30am as she decided it was time to play!! She’s one chilled puppy, who seems to have forgotten she is supposed to be traumatised by the separation from her mother.
I can’t wait to see her this Christmas, when Ira and I will hopefully be back in the UK. (Obviously our family and friends will also be a welcome sight, but Gwen sounds so adorable…)
As soon as I get some photos of the puppy, I’ll post them up here for everyone to see.
« Previous Page — Next Page »