WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin ROCKS

Posted on October 29, 2007 
Filed Under WordPress | 1 Comment

Have I whined enough about how much of a PITA it is to do these little incremental WordPress upgrades? Well, no more. This Plug-in makes the process painless.

Not that it was ever difficult…just time consuming. The Plugin does the following steps in order, prompting you to check to make sure the step was done correctly before moving on to the next:

  1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
  2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
  3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
  4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
  5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
  6. Upgrades wordpress files.
  7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
  8. Re-activates the plugins.

Worked like a charm to upgrade from 2.3 to 2.3.1 in about 5 minutes.

WordPress 2.3

Posted on September 29, 2007 
Filed Under Blogging, WordPress | Leave a Comment

Although WordPress 2.3 came out nearly a week ago, I decided to wait to upgrade it until this weekend, at a time when the kids were out of the house. After nearly 10 months as a WordPress user, I’ve learned that it’s best to pick a quiet block of time when I know that I will be able to finish what I start.

This was the easiest upgrade yet.

One thing that always bothered me about switching from the static MovableType to the dynamic WordPress was that the upgrade process couldn’t happen in the background. If a bad upgrade in MovableType made the admin interface inaccessible, the static HTML files were still there keeping the blog up for the world. Now the WordPress installation instructions point to the Maintenance Mode plugin as a suggestion, which replaces your blog’s main public view with a splash screen that lets visitors know you’re working on something, and it sends the proper http header for search engine spiders.

They also no longer say “deactivate all your plugins” as part of the upgrade instructions. WordPress will now deactivate any troublesome plugins when it upgrades. If it ain’t broke, don’t waste your time deactivating it. From start to finish, it took about 40 minutes which included my downloading a backup copy of my theme files and the database. The majority of the time was waiting while my slow DSL connection uploaded all the files via FTP.

The upgrade reported an error, but finished anyway:

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '910-1' for key 1]
INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships (object_id, term_taxonomy_id) VALUES (’910′, ‘1′)
Upgrade Complete

Your WordPress database has been successfully upgraded!

Quite some time ago I had installed Ultimate Tag Warrior but took it out when it wasn’t compatible with a WordPress upgrade. Now WordPress has its own simplified support for tagging. Truth is, I’m really bad about tagging. I remember to do it sometimes, most of the time I don’t. I find searching to be more effective than tagging, even when tagging is implemented more consistently than I’ve ever been able to discipline myself to do. So I’m guessing that the error had something to do with the new tagging architecture not liking some remnant of that old plugin that got left in my database. Oh well. Can’t see a problem anywhere else, so I won’t worry about it.

The new update notification system let me know that my WordPress Stats plugin was out of date. Every other plug-in appears to be working.

I love that the new “Advanced WYSIWG” menu has been taken to the full version from WordPress.com. No more going over to code view to set headers, or cleaning text through TextEdit before importing. It is also helpful for copy/paste between Word files without getting all that <mso> garbage that tends to come along for the ride.

Now that I’m done, how many seconds will it take for WordPress to release a security update, forcing me to go through the whole thing again?

Ecto3

Posted on August 14, 2007 
Filed Under WordPress | 1 Comment

Just saw that ecto3 is available as an alpha (aka a “use at your own risk”) version. I’m giving it a shot. I no longer spend enough time in Parallels to get much use out of Windows Live Writer.

One thing that I love about ecto over other blog editing tools is something simple…when you copy a URL to the clipboard, and then hit the “link” button, ecto auto-fills the URL so you don’t have to paste. It saves one simple movement, but it’s a nice touch.

Like Erik, I’m not thrilled with a lack of a proper “preview” function. Yes, there’s the viewer or rich text view which is fine for posts like this. But I would love if my editor could pick up the style sheet of my blog and use that to preview the entry.

Update: One line of text formatted funky when published, so I pulled up the entry to fix. Found that switching to HTML and Rich Text and back throws up validation errors (warning: nested emphasis <span>). Click “Fix Automatically” and then go back and forth from HTML to Rich Text again, changing nothing, and the errors return. Looking at the HTML, ecto3 keeps throwing <span>s all over the place for no apparent reason. I keep removing the <span>s completely, and I’m still getting those “nested emphasis” warning errors. And why style a URL with an underline rather than just leave the <a></a> alone from the original style sheet? Oh well. Such is an alpha.

Another bug: it tries to “smarten” the quotes in HTML view (even though I have “smarten quotes” turned off) so when moving between HTML and Rich Text you get encoding in the HTML translated to plain text. So “it’s” appears as “it8217s”. Probably a preference somewhere to toggle, but this is the behavior that happens out of the box.

It also threw up an extended entry separator for no apparent reason. So, it’s a nice little preview. But try it just to try it…it’s an alpha. Wait for a more developed version to really start using it.

Flock 0.9

Posted on July 5, 2007 
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Remember Flock? The Firefox-based “social” browser debut to a lot of buzz a while back but then fell by the wayside. The Flock folks are still at it, with a new .9 version in early preview. I’m giving it a shot in this quick test post. Some nice new features (look for a more complete overview on WWD later).

New version of Windows Live Writer

Posted on May 31, 2007 
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For a Windows product, Windows Live Writer is an excellent blog editor. All of the C3 folks use it. They’ve finally released a new beta. Before I tell them that a new version is out, I’m testing it on my own blog with this entry. My blog is now WordPress and C3’s blogs are currently still in Movable Type. Hopefully that won’t make a difference.

There’s some good stuff in here. Besides a new more Live-like/Vista-like interface:

And more. The options change depending on the type of blog service. I noticed little things, like the option to link to an older entry in the hyperlink dialog box:

wlw-prevpost

Okay, that was a way to play with the image editing. You can now rotate an image, add a watermark and other simple editing right from the window. You can now set a different directory for image uploads via FTP.

So far, I’d say this is worth launching Parallels to run.

Note: If upgrading, make sure you update your account settings, otherwise you may not see some of the new features in the window. For example, I didn’t see the option to add a category until I did this.

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