WordPress 3 Upgrades – Smooooth.

Posted by Karin on Jun 25, 2010 in Wordpress | 0 comments

I’ve been doing script upgrades on our hosting servers, upgrading various & assorted versions of WordPress 2.x to WordPress 3.

One word: SMOOTH.

I don’t do a mass one-time operation that upgrades everybody at once. I know there are hosting co’s that have written custom scripts to do that. I don’t trust a mass script to touch & modify many websites without a person’s direct & express interaction. I believe it is imperative that a human being physically looks at the website post-upgrade to make sure it’s not broken… or if it is broken, to do some basic troubleshooting and let the site owner know what’s going on. Can you imagine opening your website one morning and finding it had been broken by an “upgrade” done by your hosting company?  UGGHHHH. No way do I want us doing that kind of thing. So I sit with my laptop, SPEED Channel on, and toggle back & forth between a terminal window and cPanel. Back, forth, back, forth. It is relaxing sort of “work” … to be honest, I don’t even consider it work.

But the actual upgrade process to WP 3 is as smooth and trouble-free as any of the version 2 upgrades were. I am really impressed with how the WP team built in so many core changes and updates, and yet they didn’t break themes, and they didn’t break the essential functionality of the script! I also haven’t yet run into a plug-in that it has broken (at least, not that I use… but I try very hard to use as few plug-ins as possible).

It literally has not added any extra steps or any work to the process. It is just like any other upgrade. :) Start-to-finish, it takes a smidge over 60 seconds to upgrade the script. Of course that doesn’t include going back & forth, marking things off on the spreadsheet, sending upgrade notifications, or cleaning out extra copies of old versions folks have tucked away here & there. (Backups are great, but there’s no technical reason to keep an old version of a script. I promise. *grin*)

If you are an Agile Hosting customer and are running WordPress, we’re happy to upgrade your WordPress to version 3 for FREE! Just open a support ticket here and we’ll take care of it right away. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s FREE :) and it won’t break your stuff. ##

‘Featured Link’ plugin = Custom Style?

Posted by Karin on May 18, 2010 in Wordpress | 0 comments

After zero suggestions here, on Facebook & via Twitter, I had to go back to the drawing board on this one.

I decided the best way to handle it is probably going to be through some wonky custom style. I think a child theme (page) might be too much… maybe… I still can’t figure out how to make the ‘style’ pull the first 150 characters & a thumbnail image from the source page though. See, ‘cuz I’m not a coder. I’m the idea person, I’m not the doer person.

Help! Need a FB-like ‘Share Link’ plugin for WP

Posted by Karin on May 3, 2010 in Wordpress | 0 comments

If Facebook can do it, WordPress can do it, right? Totally my line of thinking. :)

There are times I’d like to share/feature an article or page on another website, similar to how Facebook does it:

There must be a way to do this in WordPress without having to re-type and custom-style and what-not… where you type in the URL and it auto-generates this pretty little content preview?

I don’t want to steal content. I want people to get credit for their work. I’d like to share their work with others to show off what a great job they’ve done, and that readers should click-through and read the other site.

There must be a WP plugin out there that does this. Anybody? Anybody? …… Bueller??

Thanks for your ideas! ##

“Technical Issue” (Overloaded Tower?)

Posted by admin on Apr 16, 2010 in Geek & Tech | 0 comments

Turns out my cellular provider is aware of the molasses-like slow-downs on my tower. Interestingly, these slow-downs happen only during peak usage times — 4:15-6:00 PM, and 8:30-10:30 PM, which the technician concurred matches their reports from other customers.

The problem is due to a “technical issue” with my tower (he was extremely careful not to say anything like “the tower is overloaded” or “we failed to plan on having so many customers on that tower, so are woefully unprepared to handle the massive demand for data”) but let’s all be honest here… what other problem would happen at only peak usage times, than an overuse of available resources? Whether the throughput is maxed out, or there is a software issue having to do with allocation, whatever……. traffic is traffic, baby. Traffic sucks up resources. :)

Ahhhhh, the Information Superhighway……. I love it!!!  (Two words: JOB SECURITY)

So if you’re on the Gills Rock tower and experiencing mysterious and sudden slow-downs while surfing the internet, it’s not you or your PC. It’s Cellcom. And they can’t do anything about it.

Estimated repair time: 4-6 weeks. Yay, us!

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Snow Day in Cellville?

Posted by admin on Apr 8, 2010 in Geek & Tech | 0 comments

Apparently the snow is so heavy that this is the latency to the cell tower… less than 1500 ft. from my house.

12 36.63-135-156.netnet.net (63.135.156.36) 35.627 ms 36.198 ms 35.719 ms

13 36.63-135-156.netnet.net (63.135.156.36) 2521.303 ms 3795.809 ms 2900.099 ms

Nice.

base64 in WP themes = Delete!

Posted by admin on Apr 2, 2010 in Wordpress | 1 comment

An annoying trend I’m discovering in “free” WordPress themes is that certain PHP files are base64 encoded.

Now, granted, these files have passed the server’s exploit/trojan scanner for not containing any malware. So far. But the fact remains, there is no legitimate technical reason for encoding a file using base64.

Legitimate script authors protect their work using Ioncube. Base64 is the encoding tool of script kiddies and hackers. Hence the astute server administrator’s reluctance to allow base64 encoded files on a server.