danielsenhwong.com

I’m very confused as to why my blog suddenly received 40+ hits a day starting the day after Halloween, but okay. 286 views for my “Windows 7, and Disabling Windows Live Messenger Automatic Startup” post. Amazing.

I just enabled user registration for this blog.  I don’t know how useful it will be, but it’ll be there.  The default account level is “subscriber”, so there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference reading this blog, though I suppose commenting would be a little more fancy ifone were to create an account and log in.

As part of an effort to actually update this blog regularly instead o letting it slowly die like my old blogspot blog, I’ve been looking at a numer of different way of submitting new posts to this blog.

E-mail is nice, but typically I’m only at a computer either at home or at work… The problem is, only one of those places is an appropriate environment to be writing blog post, at least for me.

I do, however, spend a lot of time commuting, even after having moved closer to work. This presents a pretty good environment for writing blog posts, provided I don’t get motion sickness too quickly. The only issue is, I would need to find some way of efficiently writing blog posts and saving them to be uploaded once I regained acces to an Internet connection.

Surprise, surprise, there’s an iPhone/iPod Touch app that does exactly this, and it’s free! I’m using it now just to test it out, an it’s actually not too bad, though this might be more of a critique of extended typing on the iPod Touch than it is of the WordPress application.

The built-in WordPress PHP script to grab e-mails and generate blog posts from them wasn’t particularly good, so I’m now using Postie (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/), which seems to at least offer more features, though this post is really an experiment to see how well it works.

I keep having issues with the built-in WordPress installer, so I think I’m just going to use the command line and grab everything via wget.

Edit: This worked perfectly, and I definitely like Postie more than the built-in wp-mail.php method. Definite plus: being able to add tags to the post by e-mail, among other things. I’m going to have fun with this. Also, Postie supports POP3 with SSL without my ssl://server hack. I think it ends up working the same way, but the additional layer of abstraction makes it dead simple for a first-time user.

Posting by e-mail to WordPress works using the POP3 protocol, but it’s not over a secure connection by default.  In order to make this work with GMail, enter the POP3 server address as ssl://pop.gmail.com over port 995.  With the appropraite account settings, and provided that your server has the PHP SSL library compiled and installed, this should work.

I just installed WordPress 2.8 on this host using Fantastico via cPanel X, and WordPress was telling me to upgrade to 2.8.2. I noticed that there was an automatic upgrade option; all I had to do was enter the FTP/SFTP for my site, and the WordPress script would handle the rest.

The first time I ran the upgrade, however, it threw an error back at me:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.2.zip

Unpacking the core update

Could not copy file: /public_html/wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php

Installation Failed

Annoying, to say the least. A little bit of searching turned up a possible solution: checking and repairing the MySQL database tables. There’s no reason I can think of that this should work, but it’s a nondestructive method, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I had phpMySQL check and repair the tables in the WordPress database that had been created, and even though nothing appeared wrong, at least according to the status messages, doing this fixed the automatic update problem that I was having with WordPress!

This is where I first found this fix suggestion:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/277858?replies=10

But a little more digging turned up this blog entry:
http://www.kmcgraphics.com/2009/06/11/installation-failed-fix-for-wordpress-2-8-upgrade/

I’m also sending in this post my e-mail just to see if it will work.

Edit: turns out it does, but not as well as I would like.

I’ve finally decided to revive my blog, though I’ve moved it from Blogger to my own domain and host so that I can make the most out of hosting I’m actually paying for and planning to use primarily to develop websites and applications I think would improve life or some process with which I’m intimately familiar.

So far, I’ve been spending my time trying to figure out how doing all of this on a shared host will change in comparison to all the online tutorials on web development which assume that work is being done on a local machine, and with complete root user access.  I’ve done this before, but with each new host and new version of cPanel or other management software, the details change, sometimes dramatically.

Hopefully things will work out — let’s see what happens.