From the Orient

This blog went into extended hibernation a few years ago; it is old and often falls asleep. Whilst it slept, Wordpress steadily upgraded leaving this poor blog behind. As the versions progressed, I got more and more fearful that an upgrade would be too much for this old bear of a blog, and it would be killed off, an upgrade too far.

However, not upgrading meant that the blog was more and more likely to get ill, security exploits and spam making it more and more ill. The spam traps were failing and I was getting email after email telling me some spam had been written to the blog or placed in moderation. Something like 2000 odd spam messages built up, growing like a cancer. Yet still I did not act.

I thought it would be too hard, too complicated and take too much time to upgrade. I was wrong.

Yesterday, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade. Finally, reading the instructions about upgrading from 1.5 blog, I realised that it was quite straightforward. I decided to use the SVN version of upgrading, knowing how easy it was to upgrade from other blogs I run.

I can boil it down to 7 easy steps.

1. Backup, backup, backup and check your backup. Backup again, once more for luck. Look, just make sure you backup in case, or when you mess this up. Make sure you backup the mysql database as well (this happens automagically for me on the server)
2. Disable all your plugins – most plugins that worked in 1.5 won’t work in 2.3.2
3. Create a new directory and use the SVN commands to grab the latest version of wordpress.

   svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2 .

4. Copy your wp-config.php and .htaccess to the new blog
5. Move the old blog into a different directory, move the new blog to where the old blog was
6. Run http://blog.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
7. That’s it

Note, you’ll still have to do stuff like make your blog look pretty, install new plugins etc and so on, but as I was using the default theme before, all I had to do was copy an image across.

I havn’t install any plugins as a) it was so long ago, I don’t remember what plugins did what anyway and b) most of the plugins had functionality that was now part of wordpress itself anyway.

So, if you have an old blog running an ancient version of Wordpress, just upgrade it, it is not that hard.

Paul Wordpress backup, blogs, svn, upgrade, Wordpress

Anyone interested in how to put together web “services” into a useful system, should check out moosifer jones’ reading.

Mags has been using “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us tags to keep track of books she “is reading”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.current, “has read”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.read and is “waiting to read”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.to.be.read.

Then, it has all been put together on a blogspot weblog. As Mags points out :-

this lets me just google a book, tag it with delicious and the whole updating thing is done. Much easier, and not reliant on a book being on amazon’s lists.

I’ve been thinking of doing some sort of book recording system for ages and the answer is out there.

On a related note, is “outsourced”:http://erikbenson.typepad.com/mu/2005/02/using_bloglines.html where Erik Benson (of all-consuming, speaking of book recording systems) talks about how he uses various online systems to manage his online presence.

11) RSS is already normalized. Bloglines also does some cleaning up for me. What I get back from Bloglines is beautiful content that looks the same no matter which site I originally posted it on. Since everything goes through this filter, there’s really no need to have access to the database of content directly. I therefore decided to move all of them off my server and to make Bloglines the mesh net through which I collect all content.

Food for thought there too. I’m leaning towards doing something like this myself.

Paul Blogging

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Paul Blogging

I’m rather impressed by the “latest version of Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. I’ve always been impressed by Firefox, but the Preview Release has a real polished, this is ready for the big time, feel about it.

Apart from fixing “my little bloglines/tabbrowser issue”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/09/08/extensions the latest release has small but important enhancements such as a better default theme; the same theme as before but just better. I’m no UI expert but there are small changes on the spacing and icons that improve it.

The Improved Find is excellent, and Live Bookmarks would be very useful if I still used bookmarks. Someone not using a feed reader, and used to favourites and bookmarks would find this very useful indeed. Simon Willison points out that “a killer app for Live bookmarks”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/09/14/liveBookmarks would be where your “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us feed as a live bookmark “will give you access to your most recently added items within the browser UI”

What I think would be the killer-app would be when you can drag a link into that bookmark folder (as you can with normal bookmarks) and that is automatically added to you linklog. Automatic, synchronized, live linklogging from your browser.

Paul Blogging, Firefox

“Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com and the “Tabbrowser Extension for Firefox”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en don’t like each other very much. You can click on folders in Bloglines and get the posts, but not on individual feeds. Whilst annoying, this hasn’t been too much of an issue until after I’d been on holiday. My link lists folder had nearly 2000 unread posts and I couldn’t read them all in one sitting.

“IE view”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=35&vid=156 and “the great”:http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/08/getting_back_out_of_ie.php “Firefox View”:http://www.iosart.com/firefox/firefoxview/ to the rescue. From bloglines, I enter Internet Explorer. I can click on individual feeds and pick them off one by one. If a page interests me, I can click Firefox View and it opens as a new tab in the background in Firefox. Kludgey but magic. And isn’t IE annoying to use after being with Firefox?

Paul Blogging, Firefox, General

I just lost a great long post about all sorts of stuff when Firefox crashed on me.

To summarize :-

I have a current favourite new blog – Apothecary’s Drawer Weblog
Just read it. I loved the research into the “You are what you eat” program.

I like the way “Matthew Revell”:http://www.understated.co.uk/blog/ drew my attention to the weblog by having it featured as an “other site” rather than just list his blogroll.

I invented a new realitydocusoap called “Celebrity Big House Clean Laundry Swap Makeovers from Hell …. 4″ presented by Steve Penk, but I’m not going to type it all in a again.

Paul Blogging