It eventually got indexed and got pretty trashed.  In the same vein as why I had started it, I secured it with various means (only registered users could post, simple captcha to create account) cleaned it up, and it had a long quiet life of it’s own with a few actual changes that were worthwhile. Every blue moon someone would put some spam on the site which was easy enough to clean out manually.

For several years it was easy enough to maintain with the manual method. At one point, I decided to go ahead and host my domain(s) so I embarked on another learning process from moving some existing web services (WordPress, Mediawiki, MyTinyToDo, etc.) with data from a locally managed “server” to a hosted one. Again, I kept the database intact and made the migration transparent just for the sake of a learning exercise.

Recently, my captcha must have been broken as in just a few days it logged up hundreds of changes which were almost entirely spam and link farms. I kept all the data and the database, but it will probably just wither away and die eventually.

As a side note, who knew that captcha was an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

I have an offer to update my Theme to a WordPress 3 Theme, but I have made some changes to the default.  Maybe at a later date.

Overall, impressed with the upgrade process.  Good job!

It allows you to insert photos, but you can not select where they will end up in the post, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to delete then (hence the off topic and random attachments on this post … at least until I log on and delete them through the Dashboard using a computer with a full browser).

OK. Enough of this post. I will post a more through review of the iPad and my first 24 hours with it later.

The keyboard is much faster than the iPhone keyboard, but not as fast as an actual keyboard. Text navigation is also a bit slower than on a computer with keyboard and mouse, but still doable.

Using the Dashboard HTML editor it is also laborious to create links. However, it can be done manually (as opposed to using the GUI). Same thing goes for more advanced text editing features, you can do them, but not as easy or as fast as the WYSIWYG way of doing things.

Tagging and other post features are really no different than on a computer.

Enough of this post. I’ll write another with the WordPress iPad app later today and maybe another with some more solid review of the iPad itself at a later date.

So for several years and several providers (Verizon DSL, Comcast Cable, and until recently Time Warner Cable), I’ve been running a small laptop as a web host.  It runs WordPress, Mediawiki, some static pages, and some other applications that I use (like MyTinyTodo).  I’ve also used it to host FTP for large files that I couldn’t attach to an e-mail, and many many other uses. It has proved a geeks invaluable tool. I used dyndns.org to keep up with any IP changes (which has happened a total of three times in five or six years). Now my upstream traffic is tiny and is probably not even noticed. The site gets very few visitors and viewing my web stats only a few MB per day worth of traffic. It was nice to have the ability to reach my home from the public internet.

Recently due to some changes, Time Warner has blocked incoming connections to my little server (I can’t even SSH to my home anymore) (and reading their fine print on their service they do not allow users to “run servers”). So while this pisses me off, I’m actually getting ready to physically move (again) from NC to NY so was considering hosting my sites anyway.

I went with the super budget hosting (iPage.com). In the event that I don’t like it, I can pay for a more expensive hosting solution, but I just needed basic transfer, MySQL, PHP5 and some tools to manage it with.  I also took good notes on things that worked and things that didn’t and kept good backups of my work and will continue to take backups of databases and file structure so I can move easily.

I didn’t transfer my domains, just updated their nameservers to the new hosting company. This in essence commoditized hosting as I can move at will to the provider which provides me what I need at what I am willing to pay (granted there is some elbow grease involved in the process).

Here is what I had to do:

Static Files – FTP them to the correct directory, point the subdomain to that directory, update nameservers on the Domain Manager on GoDaddy.

WikiMedia – a little more complex and I possibly could have simplified things – install new version of WikiMedia (create database, etc.), perform export on old server, perform import on new server, point subdomain to correct directory, update nameservers on GoDaddy. I also moved the extensions by simply moving the extension directory over and adding the extensions in LocalSettings.php … there are some files that I will move manually and one of my extensions isn’t working properly (probably a version issue with the new version of MediaWiki, but I bet I can fix that one by hand (sometimes coding is actually fun)).

MyTinyTodo – expand tar file, move database (export from old server, import to new server), run setup … super easy, point subdomain to correct directory

WordPress – followed instructions here – there were some limitations on the size of the SQL Import on my new hosting company (via their phpMyAdmin version) so moving the database had to happen in parts (the one large table had to be broken up into 8MB segments (I just used vi)), but it’s done now – point subdomain to correct directory, copy MX records and some other domain specific (subdomain) information from my old nameservers (dyndns.org) to the hosting company, update nameservers on GoDaddy.

Overall it was not too complicated. If you are methodical about the process you can move from one hosting company to another with little trouble and minimum downtime (or like I did from your own host to a hosted solution).

As it was looking like my blog consisted of nothing but tweets, I wanted to hide my weekly tweet posts (from Twitter Tools) from my main blog page. I still wanted them available for search engines, or if someone just wants to see my tweetroll (hey baby … want to see my tweetroll?) (did I just coin a new word? – A google search indicates I did not).

After poking around on google and the WordPress site, I figured out a pretty easy way to do what I wanted.

1. Download and install the Advanced Category Excluder plugin
2. Put all of your Twitter Tools weekly digests in a category if their own (tweets)
3. Set incoming Twitter Tools weekly digest posts to post to the new category
4. In the ACE settings select the Twitter Tools weekly digest category on the Home column

Once these steps are completed, your tweet digest posts are no longer visible on the main page.

The next step for me was to create a page for my tweet digest posts.

1. Create a page (I named mine My Tweets)
2. On the page, include only the URL of that category (mine is http://blog.sidboswell.com/category/tweets)
3. Assign it a template type of Redirect

That’s all that I needed to do.  You can tweak the settings of ACE pretty easily to hide or un-hide your tweet digest posts from widgets and plugins where appropriate.

No modifications of any kind were necessary on my part. After installing, I immediatly browsed to my blog from my iPhone and checked it out. I then went into the settings for the plugin and made some changes like including tags in the theme, or changing the icons in the menu.

Here are some screenshots from my iPhone:

And since I was plug-in happy, I added the NextGEN Gallary as well..now I just need to see how that is displayed on my iPhone.

I took a screenshot and there were the auto saves, so I didn’t lose much text. However, I did have to re-type a paragraph or two.

It’s what you get for using a beta so I’m not really complaining, I’m just warning others.

Now if themes were that easy…

To install the theme you simply move the theme zip file into your $WPHOME/themes directory and unzip it (may need to change permissions depending on your setup). All that’s left is to select the theme using the administration pages.

I liked the new theme, as I was getting tired of the orange on black thin column page, so I made a few changes to the widgets that were visible in my sidebar and let it rip.

I don’t know why installing themes via an install button through the administration pages and the themes site is not available. From an OS perspective, if you can do one you should be able to do the other since you’re just writing files to a directory somewhere under the $WPHOME directory (if the web server has write permissions to the $WPHOME directory (which is required for installing plugins/widgets via the administration pages)).

After I let the new theme soak, I made the following customizations the template:

• I had to make one change because I was pretty anal. I had to modify the sidebar.php file. I did that just because like I said, I’m anal. I basically removed the Archive and Category entries as I would rather have the widget style of those items.
• I added a redirect.php page for an automatic redirect from a page (using a page as a link) so I could link to my personal web pages.
• I updated the header image with a picture I took in Alaska around 5am of the eastern ridge of the Alaska Range. We were leaving the back county in Denali National Park when I took the picture.
• I updated the header color scheme in style.css to change the color of the text.
• Lastly, I modified the end.php file to add a timer_stop entry to indicate how long my server (currently an old Dell Laptop I got for $250) took to generate the page. When I added this line, I also had to edit style.css and change the top margin in the footer.
• I updated the 404.css and 404.php files as the default files that came with the template were bunk.

I added a SEO widget even though it’s probably useless for this blog. It was fun to add and I’ll see if it makes a difference.

I added WordPress Popular Posts which is why on the index (or main) page you see the posts that are visited most often.

I added WordPress Stats which tracks some specifics that my awstats package on my server wasn’t tracking.

And as you can see from the post below, I added Twitter Tools and enabled a weekly digest of my tweets to be posted to the blog.

I’m also using Akismet, Share This and WordPress Database Backup

Any cool widgets you would recommend for a personal blog?