weblog – The Kind Healer

Painless, Pt 2

Well, deciding to move the wordpress site back to my web ‘root’ (where it should have been in the first place) has been a bit of a pain after all. Despite making all kinds of redirect setups, MystBlogs does not seem to syndicate the site anymore. And of course I’m finding a lot of external and internal linking that needs correcting (as the fresh import has changed the post URL structure). Not a big deal yet, I’m working through all that.

One nice thing so far is how few plugins I need now, in comparison to what I used to have. This new ‘Jetpack’ thing that WP included in the install has served a number of my needs, though I’ve disabled about half the features anyway. :p Three ‘quickie’ plugins used to modify comment/trackback etc behavior ended up in Core. So at minimum I’ve only needed to add in Bad Behavior so far (Akismet spam protection also came installed).

One new thing I did add is something to manage the Redirect Hell I’m in now. It’s probably going to end up part of my main plugin list, until things cool down in a year or so. I’m hoping Google etc will re-scan the site and re-hash everything in the new format soonish.

–TSK

Well that was painless

Removal/Archive (tarballs) of all non-personal web data – Done.
Export of old site to WXML – Done.
Complete re-install from scratch – Done (including removal of /weblog, with symlink).
Re-import of old post etc data from old site – Done.
Minor copies over – Done.

Still need to get brand new plugins and install them from scratch too. But so far looks good.

Heck of a thing to do, but I honestly cannot trust the old site data after the hack attempt last Dec (that also took out Mysterium at the time).

I still need to sit down and do export/archives of any lingering MySQL databases – there are far too many at this point.

EDIT – Looks like I’ve lost my Links in the import. Not a huge loss, will work on that later.

EDIT #2 – And now a RewriteRule to remove /weblog altogether (so that MystBlogs et al can see me, I think). Mostly there, still need to track down a couple plugins.

–TSK

Upgrade and Site Collapse

Since its been awhile (and I have tonight off), I decided to upgrade my site to latest WP. Though I eventually got it done, it was a bit rocky on the way there – on par with a previous upgrade failure.

The main source of the problem (so far) appears to be an SEO plugin that I installed a while ago; As I wasn’t really doing anything with it, it got tossed. All the main components (including my two main spam preventors) are still there though, so for now I’m happy.

I can’t thank the SimpleScripts installer enough in making rollbacks easy. Probably would have spent the rest of the night getting to this point. ;)

Oh, in the process I’ve dropped the old (blog.txt) theme. The WordPress folks have a pretty decent ‘starter’ theme now, which loaded faster too.

Now the only outstanding issue is to get ZenPhotoPress back in action [Fixed, but slow]. And maybe get a replacement banner pic for the one this theme includes.

–TSK

Oddness with WP 2.7 & Admin

Upgraded my sites to WordPress 2.7 today. Things have mostly been happy, but there’s some kinda problem with cforms (in particular after I needed to upgrade that separately). So, that’s down yet again. *sigh* I’ll check on it later.

More interestingly, after fiddling with the cforms admin panels for awhile (which I hate due to its slow response), I gave up and went back to my site page, and back to Admin/Dashboard. Which I suddenly could not load (all pages – including the main page – said unreachable by FF). Removing cforms altogether, followed by a login through IE, has fixed the problem for now.

Oh well. I guess its time to look at comment systems again. This time something dead simple on the admin side.

/salute
–TSK

Much Fun /w Upgrades…

Lots of things in the last couple days:

-> Upgrade both my sites to WP 1.6.1; Unfortunately that also required I switch off of Fantastico and onto something called ‘Simple Scripts,’ but the interface does not look *too* bad and I guess I’ll just have to watch and see…

-> The two notebooks had their HDDs swapped. Now the HP has the Sager’s 7200 RPM disk, which makes it much snappier but also quite a bit hotter (I still have a 40 gig lying around from the Slug that, if faster than 4800 rpm, may become the ‘final’ disk here). The other downside was that I cannot find the HP notebook’s XP media disk. So…

-> The HP now is running Debian. Also, very good response, snappy boot time, and looking good – other than wireless (WTF is Etch doing on 2.6.18 still?). *sigh* I downloaded the ‘lenny’ netinstall ISO and will try that next.

-> The Sager is pretty much a write-off at this point, due to a combo of its weight and the lack of a even-close-to-modern video card. Again, I’m willing to part it out, for anyone interested, or sell the unit as a whole. It *will* play Uru TPOTS/CC just fine. It just barely (today) will do SL, but it should be OK with There.com as well.

/salute
–TSK