wordpress – 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

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

Heading to the Modern (WebLog) World / Migration Guide

Just spent the last two hours doing many upgrades on the main site:

-> WordPress 2.3.x (I’d give 2.5 a whirl but Fantastico is not allowing that yet). Removing the two offending lines per the upgrade note fixed the issue of my earlier attempt.

-> Upgrade and/or removal of a bunch of the existing plugins/widgets (the most notable of which were Bad Behavior and Akismet).

-> Upgrade the theme (blog.txt) from 1.1 to 4.01. Again, latest can’t be grabbed due to WP 2.5 incompatibilities (though the idea of having gravitar support irks me – as the theme selection suggests, I prefer simple). One plus is that this version of the theme now can be done in three-column format, which I’m taking advantage of; With a few other tweaks, it now nicely fits the entire width of my old 19″ LCD with no bottom scrollbar (and still readable!).

I suppose the T_S_Journal should have the same treatment done, but I’m still debating its takedown. A peek at the UruBlogs page (my first look in about five months), shows that it has focused back to ‘external’ content *salutes to Whilyam and Tweek* and that is swaying me back to maintaining it again. I’m also an immediate fan of Tweek’s ‘markup’ for KI images and will be using that if needed.

—–

Oh, side note: I’m finally planning out the ‘guide’ for SL that I mentioned in the MOUL forum, and that some folks had approved on. The big thing that I wanted to have was something similar to Wikipedia’s NPOV (or as close to it as possible), so I’m crafting a notecard to drop on certain residents asking if its OK to include their weblog or other links on my document. This will probably include a couple established sites that are critical of the ‘Labs and have reasonable arguments.

Also – at some point – I hope to include There.com and the MMOs that most have interests in – but either with external help or lots of personal free time. I will track down a new plugin for external contact in a little bit (probably within the hour of this post) so that anyone curious can ask directly.

–TSK