48-Hour Days

The two or three of you out there who do read my blog will have been noticing some rather frustrating problems. They are all my fault. I apologize. Here’s what happened, just to explain and to make sure I don’t make the mistake again.

I recently upgraded WordPress on my server from 2.3.3 to 2.5. On my server I keep the previous version in place so that I can easily roll back. I keep the WordPress installations in a directory named with the version, so right now I have wordpress_2-3-3 and wordpress_2-5. So that I don’t have to update Apache as to what version to serve, I have a symbolic link wordpress which always points to the latest version.

My upgrade procedure is:

1. Copy tarball to install location
2. Remove wordpress symbolic link
3. Expand the tarball; this results in a new wordpress directory
4. Rename wordpress to wordpress_<version>; in this case the new directory was named wordpress_2-5
5. Copy over everything that I need from the wp-content directory in the previous version to the new version
6. Copy wp-config.php from the old version’s directory to the new version’s directory
7. Reinstate the wordpress symbolic link, but this time point it to the new version

At this point I thought I was done. But I forgot one important little file. In order for “pretty” permalinks to work, you must give Apache some instructions. The easiest way to do this is to create a .htaccess file in the WordPress directory. If the permissions on the file are right, WordPress will even update it automatically for you when you change the Permalink setting.

So, this morning I finally realized what my problems were all about, copied that file over to the new version, and BINGO! Amazingly enough when WordPress has the correct configuration files and Apache has its correct configuration files, your blog is served correctly.

Again, I apologize to my few readers out there. I hope you haven’t already unsubscribed. Now I have documented the process and future upgrades should be less painful.

One of the great things about WordPress is how easily you can customize the look of it. Right away I wanted to ditch the boring default theme. But I wanted something that would represent the absolute craziness of my life. Good luck!!!

I went through lots of themes that I really liked. I started out looking for something with a clock in it, but had no luck. I did find Watch2, but that was too serious or something. A Method of Life is nice. I like the graphic of the girl, except she’d need to have red hair. Also, I decided it was way too calm for me. Coffee Chick is cute and I dig the retro vibe. I really, really like my coffee, so that’s why I considered it. But, again, it just didn’t fit my overall theme.

I finally settled on the current theme, Working Girl. It is fun, but seems to communicate the frenzy of trying to get my work done. Really, she needs to have another arm with a feather duster, another arm with a baby, another arm stirring a pot, etc. And (how is this for meant to be?) it was just posted on my birthday! So, I’m sticking with this for now. I’d really like to work up my own soon, though.

I am completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of themes that are available. How does one ever find just the right one? I tried searching the official WordPress theme site using keywords like “mom”, “mommy”, “work”, “kids”, etc. but really didn’t come up with much that struck my fancy. I googled like crazy and still didn’t come up with anything. There has to be a better way! Or, are you just supposed to hire someone who will build what you want? Maybe that’s the idea, I don’t know. I would just say that if someone can come up with one site that has all of these themes with sane keywords assigned (other than “left sidebar”, “blue”, etc.) and make the whole bloody thing searchable, that would be awesome!

Arrrgh! So many problems getting WordPress running on Debian etch. Well, to be fair, problems getting it to run with Apache 1.3, which I was still faithfully running. I started up Apache2 and had no problem at all.

It seems that the problem was with trying to access the MySQL 5.something database from php4. I didn’t have a php5 module for Apache2, though. Apache2 by default uses php5, which seems to have no problem talking to MySQL, and thus setting up WordPress.

I’m sure I could have found a solution all the way around, but there really wasn’t any reason to. I moved all of the work sites to my new MacBook Pro, so this server now only hosts personal sites. That’s as it should be anyway.

Now, to figure out the exact paradigm for the apache2 configuration files. It is a bit different and instead of having one monolithic configuration file, it seems you now break everything out. This is kinda cool and the organization freak in me really likes it.

Now I can get rid of Drupal. I really wasn’t at all happy with it once I got it up and running. But, I never spent a ton of time on it, either. I just went with it because that is what Tom installed at work to handle some stuff and I thought running my own install would give me some experience with it. But it tries to do too many things, I think. Therefore, it can get complex and you need to install a module to do just about anything. All I really wanted was blogs. I can build from there.

So, anyway, here’s the first post.