WordPress 3.0
Version 3.0 of WordPress was just released, and I have painlessly upgraded my blogs. There are a few features that I am looking forward to using.
- Ability to host multiple blogs on the same WordPress installation (I still need to see if it supports multiple domain, so my blogs don’t have to be on the same domain.)
- Ability to upgrade plugins in a batch.
Automatic WordPress Backup
In this post, I mentioned that I was using WordPress Database Backup to backup the databases from my WordPress installations. I was using this too email myself the dumps of the databases.
I have switched to using the Automatic WordPress Backup. This plugin will backup the themes, plugins, configuration files, uploaded files, and the dump of the database, to an Amazon S3 bucket. You can configure the plugin to keep a number days or weeks of backups.
Connecting blog to Google Buzz
This post on Google Buzz describes the steps required to connect your blog to Google Buzz, and have posts automatically imported into your Buzz feed.
This plugin for WordPress makes it very easy to claim your blog, without having to modify the template manually.
VaultPress and WordPress backups
VaultPress is in interesting WordPress plugin/service. You install a plugin and then their services offers the following features:
- Automatic backup of your content that is hosted in WordPress
- Automatic patching of your WordPress install
I think that the automatic backup of content is interesting, especially since the backup happens as soon as you add content. I am not sure about the automatic patching of the WordPress installation. I would be concerned about the plugin patching the WordPress installation to one that has a problem, without my knowledge. For example, WordPress 2.9 had a problem with certain version of the curl library in PHP, and the 2.9.1 version fixed it. When performing the patch manually, you have the opportunity to make sure that there aren’t any reported problems.
Also, I am interested in seeing how a restore would work with this plugin. For example, if my database got corrupt, how would I restore. Also, how many previous revisions are kept in the backup. Since they are saving any change made in the WordPress installation to the backup, this could also mean that any accidental/malicious deletion would also be automatically propagated.
Currently, I am just using the WordPress Database Backup plugin, and just having it email me the dumps of the database tables. If I need to restore, I would just need to restore the database from the backup that I want. The things that are not being backed-up in this process are any uploaded photos or the installation itself, but that is covered my my hosting provider.
[via Matt Cutts]
Moved to hosted WordPress
I have decided to move my blogs to Godaddy’s host that comes with WordPress preinstalled/preconfigured. Management is very easy, and I am now able to use WordPress’ built in plugin update mechanism. Also, Godaddy will manage update the WordPress install.
I was easily able to export the posts from my the WordPress installations on my Virtual Private Server, and import them into the new installation. I was able to test the new setup, before changing my DNS records, so I was able to make sure everything was working before I made the switch. Read more
FriendFeed Comments plugin
The FriendFeed Comment plugin is a WordPress plugin that lets you display the comments that have been posted for an article on FriendFeed. The comments that were written on FriendFeed, are shown along with the comments that were written on the blog itself.
In addition to letting you display the FriendFeed comments, you can also also have any comments written by the blog author on the blog itself, added to FriendFeed.
[via Zeigen]
Comments after switching to WordPress
I have notices something interesting after making the switch to WordPress. Many of my older posts are now being commented on with a higher frequency than they were with LifeType. I think that there are some potential reasons for this
- LifeType had a Bayesian spam filter. It is possible that it was trained poorly over time, so these comments were marked as spam and deleted immediately
- There could have been a bug in the other spam filters, which would have deleted those comments.
- Since I am submitting a new sitemap for the WordPress blog, the posts could see “fresher” and could appear higher in search results.
WordPress for web site
A while ago, I wanted to set up a new web site. I didn’t want to hand edit the html, as I usually do, so I decided to use Godaddy’s Website Tonight to create the web site. Website Tonight is a web based site management system where you can use GUI tools to edit the look of a web site. The tools are done in such a way where you can easily change the theme, and have it apply to all of the pages.
I have been having some problems with Website Tonight, though. There is a bug in the UserAgent handling in the editor. It doesn’t recoginze Firefox 3.x as a recent version of a browser. So I am forced to use Internet Explorer in my Windows XP virtual machine to edit the site. In addition to that, some of the widgets that they have available have some problems. For example, Godaddy makes a rss widget available to embed an rss feed in a web page. The widget doesn’t have some of the configuration options that I want. For example, I want to include the text from the rss items themselves, but I don’t want to include the text from the channel element.
I think that WordPress will work perfectly for what I want to do. I can create multiple pages in WordPress, and they will automatically appear in the navigation for the site. I can also use WordPress’s WYSIWYG editor to edit those pages. In addition, I know that WordPress doesn’t have the problem with UserAgent detection.
Since WordPress natively deals with blog items, I am sure that it will be very easy to create a page that has one category of posts.
Facebook Connect
I have decided to use Facebook Connect on this blog, instead of my previous usage of Google Friend Connect. There are a few reasons that I am making this switch.
- I was never impressed with Google Friend Connect’s social features. Google Friend Connect doesn’t have a concept of a “friend activity feed”. So there is no way to see in an aggregated list of my contact’s activities. With Facebook Connect, comment activities appear in the Facebook News Feed
- Google Friend Connect’s comment system requires Javascript, which is not compatible with all browsers. Facebook Connect, with the WordPress plugin, the comments are still process in the normally, but there just is an addition step for publishing the status item.
This page has good instructions about setting up Facebook Connect for WordPress.
Switched to WordPress
I have just switched this blog to WordPress from LifeType. The mtexport plugin make this very easy. The main thing that the Movable Type Import Format doesn’t include is image resources. So, instead of attempting to move the images to WordPress, I just used some mod rewrite rules to redirect those requests.
First, I created an Alias in apache to the LifeType install. (I did this, so I could have access to the old LifeType installation) Then I used the following rewrite rules to redirect resource requests, and requests for the rss feeds
RewriteRule ^/gallery(.*) /archive/gallery$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^/rss.php(.*) /feed/ [L,R=301]
Unfortunately, with these rules, requests for atom feeds will now return rss feeds.
Now, I just need to pick a new theme.
