Churning Madness » Site Administration

Debian 6.0 Upgrade; Apache WebDAV Woes

willo — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:08:56 +0000

A bit ago, the Debian project announced their 6.0 release of their GNU/Linux distribution.

I upgraded recently, and all went smoothly. The one difficulty was that my WebDAV shares through Apache were no longer able to write to the file-system. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who experienced this and the fix was very simple.

Site Upgrade to WordPress 3.0

willo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 02:03:42 +0000

I finally upgraded to WordPress 3.0, now that the release is out of beta.

After the initial file upgrading, I was greeted with a completely blank screen and the underlying HTML file was completely empty.

The two major nuisances causing this problem were:

I put the WordPress site-files into its own directory. Due to something in this major software update, this functionality was broken. Thus, I had to explicitly access the “WordPress URL” directly.
I was using the “default” theme from 2.x. This theme is not present in 3.0. So, after a successful upgrade.php, I had to go under the Site-Admin “Appearance” tab. Once there, it detected it was configured with a non-existent theme, and changed this setting to the new “Twenty Ten” theme.

Now it’s working. Default theme probably needs to be personalized a bit. Otherwise, it’s working fine…

Weblog Integration Into Facebook

willo — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:35:18 +0000

I am trying out Facebook’s ability to import a weblog. Specifically, for my WordPress based weblog, I used the directions in this tutorial. Since I’ve not posted anything else recently, this is likely the only post that’ll show-up on Facebook.

"Mommy mommy, can I go out and play with all the other kids???"

willo — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:27:37 +0000

With some trepidation, I have cleaned up the vitals of my old site (fairly minimal) and have made the switch to having this be my user’s root homepage. w00t.

Still trying to iron things out on the server end. Also got allot of content I dumped into “Pages” that needs to be thrashed into better content. Also got allot of things to post about that I never got to with the old site. All in good time.

My only big annoyance right now is that “Pages” cannot be categorized. What if I want a Page that relates to a category of other things I’ve posted about?? I could just post about the subject, but then it will get lost over time. How to I assign permanence to a post!?

Data backup annoyance

willo — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:45:54 +0000

So, I was setting up a daily dump of the WordPress database, when I discovered that there was about 500KB of data. What!? Seriously, that couldn’t be right. But it was.

Narrowed it down to a cached copy of three RSS feeds, stored in the administrative “options” table. Why would cached data of any RSS feeds, let alone those that are superfluous to WordPress development belong there????

Anyway, commented out the PHP lines that fetch the RSS feeds. Then manually had to remove the cached entries in the database itself. Now it compresses down under 5KB. I’m content for now.

As to why this data was stored there, or at all is still a mystery to me. But I’m a newbie; I’m not supposed to understand, right?

Hello world!

willo — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:32:42 +0000

So, I finally broke down and tackled all the tasks of setting up WordPress on my home server. 2 nights later, I felt like I knew how the whole system works… enough at least to leave it up and running. Future experience will dictate whether I like it or not.

Right now, it is not linked from the root of my webpage, so realistically I’m the only one who will view this. But given enough time, I’ll make the switch. I wish to figure out the basics of configuration; I also wish to import most of the static info from my current (old and busted) webpage. After that, it should be a go.