Upgrading WordPress with the iPhone
I've been using InstantUpgrade for over a year now to keep my blog on the latest version of WordPress without fail. Every upgrade has been smooth and successful and has gone off without a hitch. This evening I got really brave and used my iPhone to upgrade to WordPress 2.7, again everything went smooth. The latest version, 1.0-beta2, lets you control whether the files are fetched via FTP or HTTP. I happen to still be on version 0.2, but things have been working so smoothly from version to version of WordPress, I have no plans to upgrade.
GreatWebGuy gets a face lift
Well, upon running into the theme we were using for the umphteenth time, we decided that it was time to change things around. Not finding anything that really jumped out and not wanting to start from scratch, we borrowed and modified a theme from web2themes.com I think it's definitely an improvement, but please comment and tell me how much it sucks, or how you've seen the same thing a hundred times. While in there, we took the opportunity to get rid of some plugins. Ajax-wp, while fun, really had no true benefit and it seemed to muck with the Share-this plugin. The bookmark this plugin was trashed in favor of the Share-this plugin too. While throwing out we also threw in a Google Custom Search, we've been checking out the google co-op project and thought it was worth a go, who knows maybe it'll improve search rank and Ad CTR. We'll try to post more regularly with some new Lighttpd, Ajax, and Java articles soon.
InstantUpgrade – My new favorite WordPress plugin
Suffering from an internal struggle, I love to be on the latest and greatest WordPress, but I'm also extremely lazy and don't enjoy the pain of upgrading. The WordPress upgrade process is annoying at best. If you follow all the rules and, back up your database, backup your old files, disable all your plug-ins, delete all your old files, upload the latest distribution, pray that it works and re-enable all your plug-ins, it's something that you might want to put off indefinitely.
Today "digging" around the web I found a review of the plug-in to answer my upgrade or not dilemma. The review was on GeekyGirlyGirl (I think I'm in love, don't tell my wife 
) for the InstantUpgrade plugin created by Zirona. This plugin is awesome, with a little bit of chmodding, after installing I was able to instantly upgrade to WordPress 2.2.1 with the touch of a button and fully expect all future upgrades to be as simple. I concur with the GeekyGirlyGirl's recommendation and I'm thrilled to enter the realm of hassle free WordPress upgrades.
Upgrades complete at GreatWebGuy, we’re back now and posting
We're still here, just been too busy to blog, it's been a month, but we've done a lot.
First and foremost we found a new host and at a great price. We opted for a VPS at JTLNet, for $19.95/mo. we get 15GB of disk space, 256MB of guaranteed memory, 200GB of bandwidth and the ability to install any software we want. We wouldn't recommend this setup to anyone that doesn't know what they're doing, but it's a great alternative to a dedicated server. The guys at JTLNet are top notch, many a night we've opened support tickets at 1 a.m. because we hit one roadblock or another and they're there and on top of the issue within an hour.
Having the freedom to pick your own software and not be bound to what your host is running is a beautiful, yet time consuming, thing. I've swapped out the Apache web server for Lighttpd (Lighty) 1.5, the mod_decompress module in Lighty has reduced our page sizes by 85%. For those that don't know, Lighty is a lightweight web server that serves up PHP via FastCGI faster than Apache using mod_php, it's still in Beta but so far it seems stable enough and pretty quick. We upgraded our PHP version to 5.1.2 and MySQL to 5.27 to gain any performance improvements the newer versions are bound to have. Last but not least we migrated to WordPress 2.2 and added some Ajax goodness to the site, notice as you click around we're no longer refreshing the entire page, but just the post content.
All in all things are running smoothly now, not to say we didn't hit several hurdles upgrading and migrating to a new server and platform. We'll be sharing the details of the upgrades and our troubles in our upcoming posts.
21 WordPress plug-ins, some good, some bad, some just ugly
You may have noticed that I'm short on entries this past week. New to blogging and easily distracted by shiny things, wordpress plug-ins are my Kryptonite. If you're not hosting your own blog and not playing with plug-ins all the time I imagine you're probably a much more productive blogger than me. I got off to a good rolling start, a few thousand visits last week, which I can see in a nice pretty chart thanks to Google Analytics and the wordpress plug-in that goes along with it. Every time I see a cool plug-in on someone elses blog, I feel inclined to try it out myself.
My current plug-in list looks like this:
- Ad Rotator - Let's you stick your banner ads line by line in a text file and rotates through all the ads in the file, you're able to specify the ads by name.
- AJAX Comments - Adds some of that AJAX shininess when users post comments, a little animations that let's you see the comment post without a page refresh. I know it's absolutely useless, but cool.
- Akismet - This one blocks spam in the comments.
- AuthImage - This one puts a captcha image in the comment section to avoid automated comment spamming. I like it but can be a bit annoying, I really have a hard time reading the letters from the images, which at times can cause me to lose my comments when I submit.
- diggIT - Let's you display the number of diggs on your site and have a nice big visible Digg button, I kind of stopped using this one because it seems like it can hurt page load times.
- Executable PHP widget - Nice sidebar widget that let's you place code into it, you can place pretty much anything in the widget, I think mybloglog is in mine.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement - Supposedly this one replaces all of your feeds with your feedburner url, I never quite got it working, time was wasted, I was frustrated, finally I edited the them and replaced the feed urls myself.
- Google Adsense widget - Let's you stick Adsense code into your widgetized sidebar, you could also do this with the PHP widget, may be redundant.
- Google Analytics - Adds the snippet of code that Google requires for your analytics account, I had the code in there before so I probably spent more time downloading this plug-in and installing it than it really saved me.
- Google Sitemaps - Generates a sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz every time you post an entry, the sitemap's are supposed to be compatible with Google, Yahoo, and MSN's search.
- Jerome's Keywords - Let's you assign tags to your posts so that you can have one of those fancy Web 2.0 tag clouds.
- keywords-tagcloud widget - Integrates with Jerome's Keywords to display a tagcloud in your sidebar, it's Web 2.0, it's cool.
- Kramer - This supposedly takes all your technorati links and turns them into ping backs, I have it installed activated and have yet to actually use it, me wasting time again.
- MyBlogLog Widget - This displays a picture of all the other MyBlogLog people that have been to your site, it's a cool community and the people seem to be nice so far.
- Share This - One of those social bookmark widgets, this one is very Ajaxy but lacks in other places, for instance whenever you select a place to bookmark the site to it takes you from the page, which then makes it hard to fill out the information to bookmark the article.
- Sidebar Widgets - This is a required plug-in if you have a widgetized theme, it provides that nice drag and drop interface to drag your widgets to your sidebars.
- Snap Preview AnywhereTM Plugin - This plug-in pops a preview of the site you're linking to, I used this for about a week when I realized it slowed page load time when trying to retrieve a snapshot of the page and it was just plain annoying everytime I hovered over a link for a second this preview popped up.
- Webvirtue Share Your Post-2 - Another Share This type of plug-in, but pops in a new window and allows you to bookmark the article without leaving the article.
- WP-PostRatings - Another AJAX plug-in that allows your users to rate your postings, this is one of my latest additions, I'm the only one that's rated anything and that was just to test the plug-in
- WP-UserOnline - Tells your who's logged into your site, which seems kind of pointless since this is a one man blog, I like that I can see the number of users viewing the blog.
- WP-UserOnline Widget - Widgetizes the plug-in above, so I can drag and drop instead of editing the theme.
So, as you can see, I've been busy, not writing my blog. Hopefully I can get back to writing, as soon as I check out this last plug-in....