Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Blogging

Welcome to WordPress 2.2

I don’t know what I did wrong but I just upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and everything still works.

  • Download WordPress 2.2 distribution and read instructions.
  • Upload tar archive to Bluehost using pscp.
  • Run manual database backup using AutoMySQLBackup.
  • Deactivate all plugins.
  • $ cp -rv blog blog-213
  • $ rm -fr blog
  • $ tar zxvf ~/wordpress-2.2.tar.gz
  • $ mv wordpress blog
  • Overlay contents of original wp-content/plugins and wp-content/themes directories.
  • Reactivate all plugins (apart from widgets) which is now in core.
  • Check version number (2.2) from dashboard.
  • Manually delete 143 spam comments that appeared during the 4 minutes Akismet’s shields were down.
  • Admire new full screen WYSIWYG preview post.
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a triumph for slothful indolence and lethargy

Like most newly born WordPress.com bloggers, I keenly played with all the features and tirelessly experimented with the rich variety of horrendous 1, 2 and 3 column themes.

Then, I left home and bought a domain name from a geezer in the pub. The downward spiral continues into self-hosting and mixing with the wrong crowd. Inevitably, I stayed up late, dabbled in alcohol and drugs while installing every single plugin and widget ever created for WordPress.

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Top 10 Keywords

Donncha showed me his so now I have to show him mine.

  1. dixons duty free
  2. andy c
  3. dixons tax free
  4. meaningful questions
  5. virgin media v+ box
  6. sky.com/anytime
  7. heathrow duty free shopping
  8. dixons duty free gatwick
  9. duty free shopping heathrow
  10. dbms_stats+siebel
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migration of photo blog

Yahoo! kindly chose to close my Flickr! account because it was associated with an additional email and not my primary Yahoo Id. I contacted support in an effort to resurrect my Flickr account but to no avail.

So, goodbye Flickr and hello Picasa. To get things underway, I proudly present a couple of poor quality camera phone shots from my recent stays in anonymous and overpriced hotels in Cardiff and Oxford respectively.

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resurrection of Performancing Metrics

Just 10 weeks after closing, Performancing Metrics has risen again, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

I didn’t use the previous incarnation of this statistics package as I had a hosted WordPress blog which didn’t support Javascript. When I migrated to my own WordPress blog, I used Google Analytics which is perfect for my purposes (and free) but I couldn’t resist installing the new version of the new statistics package from Performancing Metrics.

The software was really easy to install (two lines of Javascript) in the footer template. I really liked the real-time updates (better than Google Analytics which has a 3 hour lag) which are pretty addictive.

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rolling upgrade

Until 30 minutes ago, this blog was running Wordpress 2.1 courtesy of the Fantastico installation at Bluehost. The blog was fairly stable and worked fine.

However, I was investigating upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2 to plug a security issue. The Fantastico Installer currently only offers an upgrade to the flawed 2.1.1 release.

In any case, the Fantastico installer now refuses to upgrade my WordPress installation because I have installed new themes, configured additional plug-ins and even added database tables to the schema.

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dugg, slashdotted and tailranked

Dear Reader

My cruel owner got very excited last night when he went to play with his rotating tagline. Instead of his precious blog, much to his surprise, he was presented with this. His reaction to this mundane error was startling.

At last ! Look, blog, look at this. 18 months and I’ve finally done it. At last ! We’ve been dugg ! Why did it take them so long to catch on ? Look blog, look. Finally, we’ve been Slashdotted ! The poor old servers at Bluehost don’t know what’s hit them. Thousands of hits per second. Apache is on its knees begging for mercy and more swap space. Why, I bet Matt Eaton will be on the phone any second now. We’ve done it. Technorati Top 100. Blog, look, just look at that screen !

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