Deacon’s Blog

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.6. Lots of new features - most of which I had been hoping for for some time. Here’s a video tour.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 this afternoon. I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (and have used it for the last 4 updates). That went very smoothly.

On accessing the blog, it appears that my host, Dreamhost, has been having a multitude of problem on the particular server cluster upon which I am hosted. At times, over the past two weeks, the blog has been inaccessible. Hopefully they will have everything moved to a new server soon….

Kacper, a 16 year old web designer from Poland, living in Sweden, has linked up to my Gadu-Gadu WordPress plugin. Dziękuje Kacper.

An updated version will be posted to the WordPress plugins directory in the next few days.

About a week or so ago I decided to finally drop Yahoo! as my hosting company.

There were a few instances where I had to patch WordPress to make it work on Yahoo!. In addition I was getting more and more displeased with the responsiveness of their servers.

It was taking forever to load my site. Because of the slow load times I was loosing readers like crazy. My average visitors per day was cut in half.

As of December 19 I’ve been hosted on DreamHost.

After the normal cutover issues, like switching my DNS, things have been going well. Dreamhost did make the switch easy. They had easy one-click installs for things like WordPress, they use phpMyAdmin, and they have all sorts of other one-click installs for other wonderful options.

Best of all, their price is better and their server settings do not disable native WordPress stuff.

The Dreamhost servers have been running fast and my stats are picking back up (thank you to my dedicated readers).

That was until today. Dreamhost experienced a prolonged blackout on a set of servers, mine included.

I apologize if you were unable to get to my website earlier today. All seems to be resolved now.

As some may have noticed, I’ve switched WordPress themes a few times lately.

I’m trying to work out the right mix. Thanks to the Young Fogey who noted the particularly slow load times with the current theme. The articles column and sidebars should be a white background with black text. Links are in green and blockquotes are in a pinkish color.

I do like this theme. I worked on it a little. I also removed some of the JavaScript stuff from the sidebar which improves load times (it wasn’t necessary stuff anyway).

I will continue to tinker a bit to see if I can improve it further. I appreciate your patience with my tinkering…

I tested my load times in various browsers (unscientifically). I received the best results in IE and Safari. Opera was a close second. Firefox and Flock were the slowest . Also note that I am using the latest version of each.

I updated to WordPress 2.3. It went pretty well, with one exception.

My host, Yahoo!, does not allow .htaccess files. It developed a plug-in to provide for pretty permalinks. Without using their plug-in WordPress’ permalinks options (besides default) do not work. The problem is described in the WordPress help forums.

For the time being I have disabled my pretty permalinks.

We will see if Yahoo fixes this in short order - but I have my doubts. Many of their promises about automatically updating WordPress were never kept…

I will also play with their plug-in, and see if I can fix it.

Sorry for any problems related to my permalinks. If I cannot resolve this I will be seeking another host. Things should not be this difficult, with workarounds and plug-ins to handle things most folks just handle.

Update:

Mark Jaquith of Mark on WordPress discusses WordPress 2.3 Canonical URLs and the problems they may cause.

He has a one line plug-in that disables canonical URL redirection.

I installed the plug-in and reactivated the Yahoo! plug-in. Everything works now. I will use this until Yahoo corrects its issues - or until I move to a different provider.

The latest version of WordPress is out. I’ll be doing the upgrade to WordPress 2.2 in the next few hours.

Along with other great improvements, the latest version of WordPress support widgets right out-of-the-box. The gurus at WordPress are on an enhanced roll-out cycle. Stay tuned for more great innovations.

In honor of the release:

I’ve upgraded my release of the Imieniny widget plug-in to beta 0.1.

I am also releasing a new widget, the Gadu-Gadu widget plug-in. The widget is for folks who use (or would like to use) the Gadu-Gadu IM client.

I installed Flock — the social web browser last night.  It’s pretty much based on Firefox but has a lot of great social networking features built in.

I especially like the way it interfaces with blogging packages and Flickr.  It has a very clean interface as well.

I did notice several things that need work, the most annoying being that there’s no easy way to import favorites from Firefox

While I was messing around I decided to change my WordPress theme.  I’m using Lorem Ipsum by Let’s Mint.  I modified it a little by adding a sub-page list call to the pages template.  Other than that the install was clean.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve released the latest version, alpha 0.4, available from my downloads page.

I cleaned up the code a bit more and corrected an issue I had where the option values set in the Presentation - Sidebar widgets tab were reset upon re-opening. The php code was not complete and the options were lost on reloads.

I’m thinking that it is pretty stable now and I’d love your feedback on this version.

Does it work for you?
Does it make sense?
Are the options sufficient?

Thanks.

I’ve updated the Imieniny widget as follows:

• Added support for setting time offsets in the administrative interface.
• Added support for re-naming the widget title in the administrative interface.
• Cleaned up the code

Special thanks for the guidance from Kaf Oseo at guff szub. See WP plugin: My Widget - example WordPress widget.

The current version is alpha 0.3. The download is available from my Downloads page.