Tag: WordPress

I upgraded FP to WordPress 2.5 tonight. I’d been thinking about doing it for a few days, but I was moved to act when I read that Technorati has decided to stop indexing blogs using WP 2.3.2 and earlier. Now, I don’t really care about whether Technorati is indexing my journal, but I figure Technorati at least has their act together enough to know whether the security hole in 2.3.2 is serious. Not conclusive evidence, but enough to make me make the jump.

It’s going to take me a little while to get used to the new admin interface. It’s shiny and flashy, but of course all the pieces have been moved around a bit.

At least the plugins I’m using all seem to work. Indeed, Fold Category List has a new version which works with the WP 2.3 and later database format.

Anyway, it seems to have gone smoothly. Let me know if anything seems screwy. Hopefully this won’t make any difference to you at all!

I’m upgrading FP to WordPress 2.3.1 from 2.2.1, which seems to have broken the category list in the left sidebar. Hopefully I can get it fixed up fairly soon. I also upgraded a bunch of the plugins. Everything else seems to be working properly as best I can tell. Let me know if you notice anything else that seems broken and I’ll take a look.

I’ll also probably move off the Atom 1.0 for WordPress plugin sometime soon, which means the feed might get spammed with some extra posts at some point (especially if you’re reading it through the LiveJournal syndication feed, since LJ seems to be remarkably stupid at figuring out that a post is just one it’s already syndicated with some minor edits). Hopefully it won’t be too bad, though.

Fun fun.

FP has been upgraded to WordPress 2.1. For some reason DreamHost‘s one-click upgrade wasn’t working for me earlier, so I shot them an e-mail, and a little later (after dinner and a coffee shop run) got back a “Huh, I don’t know what went wrong, I put through another request for you and it worked this time” response. So the upgrade has occurred.

It looks like my plugins came along for the ride (to my surprise – I’d expected to have to reinstall them), and they seem to be working. The exception is that the category list in the left sidebar is completely borked: It looks like it’s showing my Blogroll categories instead. But if that’s the worst that’s happened, then this has been a smooth upgrade indeed.

That and any other glitches will have to wait until tomorrow evening, at the earliest, for me to look into them. I’d hoped to iron out any lingering problems tonight, but that had been predicated on the one-click upgrade occurring on demand, and since something went wrong there, I’ll need to make time later. So please be patient if anything seems to be amiss. (And a quick e-mail telling me if you find anything else that’s not working would be appreciated, too!)

FP’s hosting service Dreamhost is going to be upgrading PHP to version 5 on Monday. PHP is the language which drives FP’s blogging software, WordPress, and the upshot is that I will need to upgrade FP this weekend to WordPress 2.1 or risk breakage.

I’m a little nervous about this, since it will be my first upgrade of WordPress since I launched the site. While I have customized a few things, none of it was very complicated and hopefully I can get it up and running again fairly quickly. My main worry is that if something somehow goes wrong with the interface to the MySQL database which stores all my content, then I may be screwed, because I am not very MySQL-savvy. But as long as that part isn’t affected by the upgrade, then I should be okay. (This is why I tend to avoid WP plugins which add new tables to the database, because that’s the only part of the package of which I’m not confident in my ability to support.)

Anyway. Hopefully there will be a short outage and/or strangeness sometime this weekend when I upgrade and spend some time restoring any little hacks I need to restore, and then things will be back to normal.

I just had the urge to vent my worry. I doubt any of my readers really need to know any of this.

(And yes, I will back everything up before I start!)

I launched Fascination Place a month ago today. So far, so good, I think! As you can tell from my posting rate, I’m enjoying writing for the new format.

It’s hard to be certain, but I think I left behind about half of my readership from Gazing Into The Abyss when I moved. I suspect a big chunk is due to setting up a syndication account at LiveJournal for the site since I didn’t want to have to keep manually posting over there whenever I updated, and many readers over there haven’t subscribed to the feed for one reason or another (possibly because they happened to miss the posts I’ve made there announcing the syndication account).

Anyway, hopefully continued regular updating will eventually pull in some new readers, and perhaps bring back some of the ones I’ve lost.

I really like WordPress (the blogging software I’m using), and there haven’t been many tweaks I’ve had to make to my layout (other than trying to make it look better in Internet Explorer 6). The next hurdle will be upgrading to WordPress 2.0.5 – my first upgrade of the installation. Hopefully it will be straightforward.

One thing I’m considering adding is a “Recent Comments” section in the right-hand sidebar, like what J.D. has at Folded Space. Apparently his readers really like it.

What do you think of the journal, now that I’ve mostly worked the kinks out? Is there anything you really like, or really don’t like?

Hi there! I’m Michael Rawdon. Welcome to my new journal, Fascination Place.

I imagine that most of you reading this have come over from my old journal, Gazing Into The Abyss, at least at first. Fun as that journal was, I was getting tired of living on my little home-brew software which powered it. I wanted categories, and comments, and a domain name, and a format in which it would feel more comfortable to write small posts, and more often. And I wanted to stop feeling like my journal was living in 2001.

Over the summer I started casting around for what to use instead, and to my surprise it was just about unanimous that WordPress was the state-of-the-art blogging software out there. So that’s what I’m using, having spent most of September learning the languages that drive WordPress and customizing my set-up to get it the way I want.

Is it worth it? Time will tell. I’m pretty happy with the result, but no doubt there are some kinks to work out. You can comment or e-mail me if you see anything serious that needs attention.

I’m a little self-conscious about the title, “Fascination Place” (with no “The” – it’s like a street name), as I’ve always thought that I’m terrible at coming up with titles for things. Someone once pointed out to me that “Gazing Into The Abyss” seemed like a poor title for my journal, probably because my “abyss” is about two feet deep. So I wanted a title which was descriptive but not cynical, and that’s what I came up with. (It was hard. I told you I was terrible at coming up with titles…)

That aside, I’ve been chomping at the bit to start writing content for Fascination Place, and I set a deadline to launch this thing by this weekend, because spending any more time preparing it was just spinning my wheels. Like any new commitment, it’s a little scary (even if it’s replacing an old one which was just about the same), but it’s also kind of a relief to get started.

I hope you enjoy it.  Welcome!