philomyth.us » wordpress

Welcome to Your New Hosts

Emmanuel — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:08:24 +0000

After complaining for over a year about IX Web Hosting, I finally got off my butt and did something about it. Over the course of a couple of months, I have consolidated most of my domains over to GoDaddy and have transferred all my blogs over to DreamHost. I am hoping that this serves as a more reliable and stable setup than IX, which had constant security and stability problems.

Of course, all these changes are in the background, so if it worked (unlike last time), you guys shouldn’t notice anything except hopefully faster load times and perhaps less downtime.

Here’s a list of reminder notes for the next time:

One-click Installs are cool, except when they forget to tell you that they use customized database prefixes which don’t match previously backed-up database pointers.
Mirrored domain pointers and temporary database hostnames are helpful in transition but have to remember to clean them up and not leave any broken “links” once you go live.
Webshell on IX turned out to be a blessing, saved time on backing up the complete blog directories.
Apps used: Filezilla for FTP and PSPad for code editing.

Philomyth.us moved (and nobody noticed)

Same Blog | New Look

Emmanuel — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:17:54 +0000

Time for another design update for the ol’ blog. It’s been almost 2 years since the last makeover, which along with less frequent blog posts is a likely result of increased facebook / twitter usage.

WordPress, the back-end to this site, has made some significant progress and is now at version 2.8.x. The developers and community have done a great job making it more user-friendly in posting, managing and maintaining. Version updates are now one-click as well as plugin installs and updates. No more fiddling around with zip files and FTP.

For this latest re-design, I went with a theme called Carrington that I’ve been keeping an eye on and wanting to learn more about. It is developed as a complete CMS theme framework, which is way beyond what I need, but interesting to look into (at least for me).

The layout of the front page is pretty similar to the previous version. The biggest change is moving the moblog pics to the top bar. I have also jazzed up the Archives page to make it more visual.

There are more changes to the secondary pages due to the new theme, such as Tag, Category and Date Archive pages, which can be accessed in the sidebar. And partly with the new theme, I have made some of the page elements context sensitive depending on what type of pages you are on. For example, when you are on a post page, you can see a list of Related Posts in the sidebar, along with the clutter of front page badges hidden.

So far, this re-design looks to be pretty functional and stable. As always, if you see something that isn’t working, please let me know.

P.S. I meant to publish this post last week, but I got distracted trying to do some integration of posts and comments with Facebook, but the coding is just not quite there yet as a workable solution.

Blog Makeover

Emmanuel — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:05:06 +0000

It’s been nearly five months since I last made any significant programming and design changes to philomyth.us. As before, there were some security and programming upgrades for the underlying wordpress site software. And also, since toying with Facebook, I found some features that I could share across platforms.

I also took the opportunity to overhaul the theme design since I never could get the previous theme to work properly in Internet Explorer [get firefox] and the previous theme was also somewhat cumbersome so that I couldn’t easily make changes without having to re-learn the entire setup. I ended up choosing a theme called Cleaker 2.1, which after some customizations and modifications, I am very happy with.

Lastly, I updated the plugins (or add-ons), “out with the old in with the new”. Here’s a list of the plugins that I am running currently:

A Different Monthly Archive Script: posting calendar
Akismet: comment spam
Brian’s Latest Comments: comment listing
flickrRSS: flickr photostream
Samsarin PHP Widget: php coded widgets
SparkStats: posting graph
SRG Clean Archives: post archives
Subscribe2: email subscriptions
Subscribe To Comments: comment notification
Time Zone: daylight savings time adjustment
Ultimate Tag Warrior: post tags
Wordbook: facebook crossposting
WordPress.com Stats: site traffic
WordPress Database Backup: automatic backups
WordPress PDA: mobile-friendly site
WP AJAX Edit Comments: comment editing

As I mentioned earlier, I replaced a couple of plugins with ones that could be shared with Facebook:

Now Reading -> GoodReads
Movie Ratings -> Flixster

With any major site revisions, if you see anything that isn’t working quite right, please let me know in the comments.

Spring Cleaning

Emmanuel — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:36:40 +0000

It’s been a while since I worked on this site and my posting frequency seems to have slowed down a bit as well. After receiving a notice that there was a security update for my blogging software, WordPress, I figured it was time to make some minor updates and tweaks. Most of the changes are in the backend, but there are some new or updated features and functionality:

updated WordPress to 2.1.3
updated and cleaned up WordPress plugins.
(most notably, Now Reading list has been cleaned up and formatted with a complete book archive.)
added a Movie Review plugin which can be seen in the sidebar and also has its own movie ratings archive. I still have to input movies into the list and review them, but that’ll happen over time.
added a mobile photoblog in the sidebar for pictures that I take from my phone throughout the day.

I tried updating my theme, but it turned out to be too much work. And after having not worked on my theme for a while, I had forgotten all the little customizations that go into it. From now on, I’ll only change my theme when there is a major wordpress engine update.

I might make some more minor changes to touch things up, but that should be most of it for now. Hopefully, now that I’ve gotten my site to a point where I’m happy with the design, I’ll be more motivated to post. Here’s to hoping.

3 Column Theme

Emmanuel — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 06:02:37 +0000

I have been wanting to try a three column theme for this site to hopefully improve readability and usefulness. And now I’ve finally gone and done it. I tried out a couple of different themes and styles before finally settling on 3ColumnK2. It took a bit of squeezing and modifying to get the theme down to the size and look that I wanted, and now I can say that I am quite pleased with the results.

Please let me know if you see anything that might be broken or doesn’t look right.

(for those of you still using IE, I have tried my best to make the layout work. But if it still doesn’t look right, my solution / suggestion is that you make life better for yourself and everyone else by immediately installing Firefox. [end rant])

coComments

Emmanuel — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:09:37 +0000

I have been wanting to find a way to consolidate the different comments that I make around the web at different blogs or forums, and I came upon this web service called coComment, which does exactly that. It allows me to keep track of my comments (through a firefox extension) and view them all together in a running report. The other nice thing for my own blog is that I can also display the most recent comments that I have made in my sidebar on the right (on the main page).

I have also made the comments on philomyth.us compatible with coComment, so that if you want to use it yourself, you can track your own coComments here as well. Actually, coComment has some other useful features, but these are the ones that I found most interesting and beneficial.

Philomyth.us moved (and nobody noticed)

Emmanuel — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:53:38 +0000

In the process of moving ER-Fans, Elijah suggested I try out IX because they had a good deal on storage and bandwidth. And after looking into them, I discovered they also allow multiple domains, which was just what I needed, so I wouldn’t have to deal with multiple hosting companies for my different websites.

After running ER-Fans for a couple of weeks, I ran into some ftp problems with IX and got them sorted out with their technical support in a reasonably quick response time. So I decided to test out a move for philomyth.us, with the hosting contract expiring in December (can’t believe it’s already been a year, more on that in a later post).

After transferring all the files and setting up the database, I ran into minor import problems with the database tables (the wordpress database plugin caused some errors), which I was able to fix with some manual manipulation. Aside from that, the test ran so smoothly, I couldn’t tell the difference between the old and the new. So I just went ahead and made the switch. I can’t believe it worked that easily…I’m still crossing my fingers, waiting for something to break.

Update 1: When I went to publish this post, I encountered an error. It turns out that it was a bit too good to be true. The site was running off a cache that was transferred over, so when I made changes to the site, the cache went to update, and that’s when I encountered problems. All I had to do was to properly set the permissions, so all is good now, I hope.

Update 2: If anyone is reading now, you’ll notice that the theme has changed back to a default (plain vanilla boring). Something happened with my theme, so I am now in the process of re-installing it. I guess “I spoke too soon” would be an understatement, hehe, then again, I was expecting as much.

Del.icio.us Updated

Emmanuel — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:59:41 +0000

The WordPress plugin that I was using for the del.icio.us/PLS section in my sidebar started to go on the fritz right when I left for Asia. I shut it down for the last couple of weeks. Now that I am back and am ‘cleaning house’, I found that del.icio.us came out with their own linkroll script, so I have changed over to that. It seems to work pretty well, even can add the ‘extended descriptions’ in case anyone cares .

Comment Spam

Emmanuel — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:33:29 +0000

Errr, I hate to waste a blog entry on this, but this comment spam has just become intolerable. Anyways, I am setting comments so that they need to be approved / moderated in order to prevent the spam from spreading. That being said, I selected the option that once you have a comment that has been approved, you should be able to post comments from there on without waiting from moderation. Let me know if it works or doesn’t

E-mail Notification

Emmanuel — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 23:12:36 +0000

For those of you that would like to receive an e-mail notification whenever I make a new post, I have added a subscription form at the bottom of the sidebar (via the Email Notification Plugin). Let me know if you have any problems using it. I’m still testing it out so we’ll see how it works.