Soapbox Rants and Raves

I finally am back in the the blogging business. Moving the actual domain from my local machine to Bluehost was pretty simple, most of the problems I encountered were self induced!! It was a little more tricky to move my WordPress site from one domain (home.beilers.com) to another (beilers.com), but not really very hard.  Things to be aware of:

1. Kind of funny, the support staff knew exactly how to answer my question, just like a script! After you export your data from your old database and import into the new database, you need to change two (2) rows in the wp_options table,  ids #1 and #39 need to be updated to the new domain URL. Nice magic numbers!
2. All of my images were missing in the old posts after the migration, good thing I don’t use a lot of them! Unfortunately after I imported the data, I realized that the full (old) URL was specified in all the <img src=”"> tag attributes . I had to go through each post and change it to the new URL and path. Kind of a drag; I probably could have written a database query to do the update, but it just seemed easier to update them by hand! If I would have been more aware, I could have done a global search and replace in the exported text file; that would have been too easy!
3. There was another small import/export problem. Anywhere I used “quotes” around words, the quote (“) character was displayed in some encoded format, about 5 or 6 characters in length. I don’t remember the exact sequence, but it was pretty visible on the page, especially if you had them in a title. I might have been able to chose an alternative export format to better handle this situation, but by this time, it was too late and I really did not want to start over!
4. Don’t copy over you plug-ins, it is better to just reinstall them. I simply copied over all my plug-ins and content; which mostly seemed to work.  However when I hit the clean cache button on my wp-super-cache plug-in, it toasted my site (no longer accessible!). I was on the phone with the support team for about 30 minutes. They gave me a little scolding, but are generlly very nice people!  I can’t say enough about how helpful they are…
5. If you do move your site over, your image upload directory will probably be wrong too. Just go into your WordPress admin panel and update the upload directory to the appropriate location on the server, under your new WordPress installation. I only discovered this after ScribeFire refused to upload new images.
6. There was one other weird thing, my WordPress account for wp-stats (as well as my Linked.com blog linkage) seemed to take a couple of days to synchronize with the new domain name, the old home.beilers.com reference was there for several days after the switch. It finally switched over to beilers.com this week. All I can say, is ignorance is bliss!

I’m very happy with Bluehost and my decision to migrate over to their servers. I’m set for at least 3 years now, I hopefully won’t have to go through this exercise for quite some time!

I can’t believe that I just outsourced myself! After my recent Ubuntu upgrade experience, I finally pulled the plug and signed up with bluehost.com. For the money, it is really not a bad deal; especially if you are crazy enough to have multiple domains. Now I just have to figure out the logistics of changing the name servers and track down where the email goes. Not too big a deal, I’m just not looking forward to explaining to my family, just where to find their email!

I was really impressed with the cPanel application, just a couple of mouse clicks and you have a WordPress installation, another couple clicks sets up your email, and a few more sets up the FTP space. Pretty slick! This was not near as much fun as spending multiple evenings learning how to set this up on my own box; now I can really appreciate everything that cPanel actually does.

As a test, I transfered one domain, windyknolldesignstudio.com. Hopefully, in the next two days, all of the name servers will be synced up and I can see what I actually did! When I decide to move beilers.com, there is even a way to transfer my blog to the bluehost server; that will be an interesting test!

My Ubuntu 64-bit 9.04 upgrade did not go very smoothly, it left my machine un-bootable. The upgrade downloaded all of the packages, but seemed unable to install anything. The detail window was full of the same message, something about a dpkg failure. I was really bumming, as the upgrade on my 32-bit laptop worked flawlessly. I hoped that I could recover my blog, but was not exactly sure how it would workout. I tried using chroot after booting from the CD, but the install messed up the file system so badly, nothing would run.

I found an old 40GB Quantum Fireball drive in the basement and did a clean install. You have to give the Ubuntu team credit (even though I was pretty mad about my upgrade problem); the install was really quick and everything was auto configured after the install. I was super happy! The clean install actually fixed my NVIDIA driver issue; one of the 8.xx patches toasted my video settings about a month ago. I lost my advanced desktop effects, screen savers, and Avant Window Manager (dock). This actually ticked me off too, I hate when things don’t work like they are supposed too!  One thing that was really surprised me was how slow that old IDE drive was verses the new SATA technology. I have to get that drive out of my box, ASAP!

It was pretty easy to recover MySQL and WordPress. I never took the time to figure out how to backup MySQL, so I was a little worried about losing my blog data; I guess that will now be my number one priority.  The restore was as simple as copying all of the files from /var/lib/mysql and /var/www from my old drive to the new drive. I just had to change the file owners and groups, restart MySQL, and my blog was back, up and running. Not too bad!

Not that it would have helped, but my trusty NAS storage seems to have bit the dust last week; great timing!  I have been using a Buffalo Technology LinkStation for several years as my off-site backup, it is out in the barn! It has always worked perfectly, other than a noisy fan, which has been fixed in the new models.

I’m going to stop locally hosting my blog and sign up with bluehost. I think this will fix several issues for me; I won’t have to run my computer 24×7, upgrades won’t be such a risk, and maybe using them as an off-site backup.  I also plan to move my wife’s web site, she has an interior design business, over to bluehost as well; then I can setup a real site for her, rather than some simple web pages.

I was joking with my friends that President Obama had visited my blog twice last month and actually left some comments. I was so excited, but I could not understand why he was pushing Viagra…. those liberals are just too funny! My blog gets its fair share of spam, fortunately the Akismet plug-in does a really good job at flagging the spam comments; I just have to go into the dashboard every so often and clean them out.

I happened to hit a website today that had a nifty little captcha enabled for all of the comment fields, it was a WordPress plug-in called WP-reCaptcha. All you need to do is create an account at reCaptcha.net, generate some keys for your website and plug them into the admin screen. Can’t be much easier than that. It will be interesting to see of I get any more comments on by postings, my real readers never leave them. Good bye spammers, I will miss you!

There is another interesting feature that reCaptcha offers, the hiding of email addresses. You can generate an email url or an obsured email address format (p…@beilers.com). Not exactly sure where I would use this feature, but sometimes it is just good to know about these little things!

I found a link today for some new and updated WordPress plug-ins and figured that I should try some out. I found one that would support my New Year’s Resolution; I am trying to read more books this year. I recently finished the Blink book, and am now moving on to the Think! book. The “I am reading” plug-in is kind of cool. It hooks up to the Amazon Web Services and pulls back information based on the ISBN number. Additionally, you can enter what page you are currently reading and the plug-in creates a progress bar under the image of the book cover. Probably more pain than it is worth, but I’m looking at it as a motivator…. I need to keep reading or the progress bar will never move!

On a side note, if you have not read either of the these books, I highly recommend them. Blink was very easy to read and thought provoking. It really makes you think about how people are conditioned to think and make decisions; sometimes, not the best ones!

Just a simple test from Windows Live Writer. I have a huge backlog of thoughts in my head, but have not been able to get myself to put them down in my blog, so be prepared to start reading!

I have actually been preoccupied with LinkedIn Lately.  This “social network” thing is really kind of cool. I have been thinking about and trying to locate some people that I worked with at my previous company. I happen to send a holiday message to one of my old coworkers, asked him if he knew what happened to some of our old friends. With a little more digging, I have been able to reach out to a couple of people that I have not talked with in many, many years.

One thing that cracks me up, is when you get an LinkedIn invitation from someone that just says “I want to add you to my network”.  Pretty social, don’t you think? I try very hard to make my invitations very personal. Adding connections is more about adding people that I care about or really want to stay in touch with, rather than just adding random contacts to get my connection number up!  I guess there are many ways of using LinkedIn; add as many people as you can, so that someday, one of them can help you out.  Probably no right or wrong way, I’m sure we all have our own strategy!

My most interesting LinkedIn experience was after I posted some books on LinkedIn’s Amazon application. Out of the blue, one of my connections commented on my reading list and we started trading emails. Big deal, right? I just thought it was really cool since I have not talked to this person in about 10+ years and here we are sharing thoughts about some books!  How cool is that! I thought I would share his book recommendation with you, I will certainly add it to my reading list.

Well, this blog was really about testing Live Writer and some how I ended up writing about LinkedIn! Live Writer seems pretty cool. I don’t spend that much time in Windows, but I do really like the way Live Writer works. Much better than anything I have used on my Ubuntu box. So, if anyone has a better blog editor than ScribeFire, please let me know!

Nothing fancy, but I installed the Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget tonight… Now that I have a Twitter client on Ubuntu, I figured it was time to start sending out a few tweets. I’m tired of my sister yelling at me about not tweeting anymore!

Now that I have my new box all setup, single boot, no windows, only have Ubuntu 64-bit running on it, it was time to setup WordPress again!

I really wanted to find a better way to publish than using the internal blog publisher, so I gave ScribeFire a try… Only played with it a little bit tonight, but is was super easy to configure and seems to work pretty well. I have not tired a fancy post yet, but it seems to have lots of nice features.