Posts Tagged ‘site upgrade’

New Blog Theme

October 9th, 2009

I’ve updated the site to use the Cordobo Green Park 2 theme by Andreas Jacob, and it’s much nicer than what I had before. It took a bit of playing around with the sidebar widgets to get them set up just as I want them without overriding the standard ones included in the theme which I quite like. I tweaked the header CSS to include an image as well as text in the logo, and to reduce the font size for the h1 – h4 tags (I felt the blog post titles in particular were too big) but apart from that everything’s standard.

The only thing that went wrong with the upgrade was my mistake with upgrading the Fresh From plugin so I lost all the old tweets that it had imported. They should upgrade it so that it asks you if you want to keep them. I did a bit of tidying up on the user registrations too – all spammers with no comments at all, so I deleted them and switched off registration. You can now comment without registering – though noone really wants to anyway based on how things have gone so far 🙂

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RSS feed problem fixed

February 16th, 2009

I ran into a problem that seems to come up occasionally on the WordPress support forum – blank lines at the beginning of the RSS feed XML file for the site which causes problems since it’s no longer valid XML. A quick look at the support forum pointed me in the right direction. It turned out to be blank lines following the final ?> line in the functions.php I had added to my custom theme to add widget support to the sidebar. This file gets loaded and parsed for every request to the blog, including for the RSS feed, and the blank line is actually seen as an intended part of the output – like the regular HTML you see in PHP files. Removing the blank line sorted the problem out.

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I’m loving WordPress v2.7

February 16th, 2009

I really love the admin pages in WordPress v2.7. I particularly like the way that you can install plugins and do updates directly from the admin interface. For example I logged in today and the Dashboard told me that WordPress 2.7.1 was available, and offered me the option to do the upgrade automatically. It did warn me about making sure I had a backup, but I plunged straight in – reckless, I know, and not recommended 🙂 Anyway, in less than 15 seconds the update had been downloaded to the server, unpacked, installed, and I was back up and running. Brilliant!

I suppose the one thing that would improve this is to include an automatic backup step, which could be optional. It probably wouldn’t be that hard, and would probably be sufficient for 90% of WordPress users – it would certainly do the trick for me 🙂

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.5

April 7th, 2008

I got a strange email today from Anonymous Security Specialist telling me my blog had been hacked and I should upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Initially I was suspicious, but my usual checks for dodgy emails showed no hidden HTML or strange attachments, and some of the info in the email made me consider that this was serious. I took a quick look at the blog just in case. It took me a little while, but then I noticed that my links had been poisoned with links to several sites selling viagra or other pills – the email was no lie!

I deleted the links, looked around to make sure nothing else was wrong, and then proceeded to follow the suggestion in the email and begin the process to upgrade to WordPress 2.5. As usual with WordPress it went very well, and I didn’t have to change anything – at least as far as I can tell so far 🙂 I’m going to upgrade my other WordPress sites, but I’m not expecting it to go as smoothly on My Halo News.com – mainly due to the tweaks I’ve done to the sitemap generator and the number of posts. We’ll just have to see.

Life has been busy recently, so I have been neglecting the blog here, but hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of it soon.

Oh, and many thanks to Anonymous Security Specialist … whoever you are!

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