Tag: upgrades

S is for Spinning

I can’t believe it’s come round again already, but the Tour de Fleece starts again on 3rd July.  Which means I shall be spinning along with many many others for the duration of the Tour de France bike race.  I probably won’t be actually watching the race as I spin, because I have other things I want to watch and listen to that interest me more.  I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to be spinning yet, but I think “as much as possible” covers it fairly well.

Happily, I’ve solved the missing post button (and tags and categories areas) problem in the edit screen.  Of course I went and did all the standard things first, like disabling all my plugins.  And then it occurred to me to try changing the screen back to the default 2 column view, instead of the 1 column I had it set on.  Oh look, there were the missing areas.  I’ve now rearranged and reset it back to the way it was, and all is well.  Hoorah!

R is for Reciprocity

IComLeavWeToday is the first day of June’s IComLeavWe, the comment-leaving equivalent of NaBloPoMo.  Well, sort of – the aim is to leave five comments, and return / reply to one, every day during the week of the 21st-28th of the month.  So it’s an equivalent in that it’s a daily goal … thingy.  I know what I mean, anyway.  You can either leave comments on the blogs of the other participants, and/or any other blogs you like, really.  It’s more a self-monitored thing, I suppose, since unless you list all the places you’ve commented back on your own blog, there’s no central record.  Anyway!  The point is, it’s a cool way to find new blogs and meet new people and all – many of the blogs on the list are ones I wouldn’t normally read.  Although I am going to try to make an effort to start leaving comments for the people I do habitually read again.  I’ve been rubbish about it, really.  Perhaps I should have a try at a little double thing – five comments to the IComLeaveWe bloggers, and five to people on my own blogroll.  Could be fun!

In other news, there seems to be a bit of a hitch with this new version of WP… or at least, there is for me.  Something has disappeared some of the sections from the Post page (the one that I’m writing in!), including the all-important Post button!  I can get around it because there’s a draft-save mechanism, and then I can post from the edit screen, but still.  That’s not right!  I may have to disable some plugins and see what happens.

Upgrading

(Or, Non-alphabetical Post The Third)

WordPress 3.0 is out – has been for a couple of days, actually – so I’m going to do the upgrade soon.  Probably not tonight, but most likely tomorrow morning.  I’m glad I hadn’t got too far with the redesign I was working on, in terms of coding, so now I can incorporate anything new to the theme.  I’m not sure if there is anything, but if there is, I might as well include it.  It’s all good practise, after all.

G is for Gallery

I broke the photo album / gallery on this site ages ago, and since fixing it is going to be a long and arduous process, I haven’t done it yet.  But I’m going to set myself a(nother) challenge for this month, to get that finally sorted out, so I can have access to my photos on this site again.  Which, you know, would be (a) nice, and (b) useful.

Basically what happened, as far as I can tell (and as if anyone but me really cares), is that when I installed a WordPress gallery plugin (NextGen Gallery) to have a look at, it violently disagreed with my already installed gallery software (Coppermine), which had a bridge WP plugin so I could easily access my already existing photo galleries from there when I was writing blog posts etc.  Coppermine had been installed for years, long before I’d been using WP as my blogging platform.  Anyway, I don’t know what exactly caused it all to have a hissy fit, but I do know that none of my photos now show up, despite them physically existing on the server.  Marvellous!  I tried uninstalling NextGen Gallery, but since that didn’t help, I’m now going to move everything across to NextGen instead, and drop poor old Coppermine.  It’ll probably be easier in the long run, and I won’t have to be maintaining two databases etc any more.  But moving it all across is going to take a while, and be a pain.

If I do it a little at a time, though, it shouldn’t be too bad.  I think I’ll try to spend maybe an hour a day on it.  Surely that way it should get done pretty quickly?!  And also I’ll know for sure how long it does take me, rather than it just feeling unending.  I think giving myself permission to stop working on it after a specific period will help, too.  Let’s see how it works out.

I killed it!

My photo album, that is.  Ooops.  And yes, this time I think it really is gone – I was attempting to set up the new version of it using the NextGEN Gallery plugin within WordPress, and I guess that clashed somehow with the Coppermine script, because it’s all fallen down and the photos themselves won’t even show up as direct links.  They’re definitely physically there on the server, but I’m getting 404s when I try to reach them.  I don’t know why that is (though I have a suspicion).  So strange.

Anyway, that means that pretty much all of the photos on the blog are broken for the time being.  I’m going to try to get that fixed over the next couple of days, but I doubt it’ll happen tonight.  I have a concert to sing in!  But I might be wide awake after that, so I might make a start then after all.  Now, though, I’d better finish getting ready.  Concert blacks, here I come…

Where did the photo album go?

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happened: my photo album section has seemed to vanish off the face of the web.  Only, all the files are still there, the database seems to still be up and running… I’ve tried repairing and restoring back-ups, the whole shebang, but with no luck.  Eh?!  The little plugin that links the album script to WordPress is still working perfectly though.  You just can’t get to the album via its URL.  Not the front end or the admin section.  I wonder if it’s a conflict with a WP plugin, or if I maybe need to upgrade Coppermine?

Or perhaps it’s a sign that I should do what I’ve been considering for a while, and import the whole thing into WordPress.  Makes the template easier, that way.

ETA:  I upgraded Coppermine, and no luck.  But then it occurred to me that the upgrade page had displayed, so it must be something template-related (I hadn’t re-uploaded the template files).  So I put up new versions of those, and oh look – the photo album is back.  I’m still going to change over to using a WP plugin for it sometime soon, though, to make maintenance easier in the long run.

Tadaa: it’s version 4

Version 4 of the site is done at last: all moved over to wordpress, and with a nice springlike design – Sheep in a Field by Nikki Jeske. It feels a little bit like cheating, using a theme by someone else, but I couldn’t resist because look: SHEEEEEEEEP! I have done some tweaking to make it work exactly how I wanted it to, especially since I’m using WP pretty much as a CMS for the whole site.

Anyway, I hope everything is working – please do let me know if you come across something that’s broken!

See you on the other side…

And now, the end is here, And so I face the final curtain, My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

Yup, the time has come. Not the end of the blog, of course, just the end of this chapter of it! After this post I shall be importing all the entries from my Movable Type blog installation into the new WordPress one. Once I’ve done that, I think I’ll still have to manually edit in the tags, and set up some page redirections, but everything else should come on over.

(I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway)

What that means from an ‘outside’ POV will be a period of radio-silence (so nothing new there, then!!) during which time the MT installation will still be up and running. Then the whole site will go down for a short time while I make the final changeover, and then ta-daaaaa: new site version! It’s taken me longer than I thought, but the new site will be omg so much easier to run and update, so it’s worth it. Hooray!

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew, When I bit off more than I could chew, But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out, I faced it all and I stood tall and did it myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy way!

TTFN :-)

Bloggy Resolutions

This is a bit of a strange time to be doing this, since I’m about to import the whole blog to a new system, and who knows what will happen… but I’ve decided to make those blog resolutions that I was thinking about back when I tried the BloPoMo thingy. Assuming all goes well (and right now, it looks like it should!), a NewNew Blog should be the perfect time to start a NewNew blogging habit to go with it. Especially since the new setup makes things like importing from my photo album, and crossposting to LJ, all the easier.
So, this is what I resolve. I will:

  • Re-start / resume Project 365, which faltered in about August last year… then picked up again for a bit, but ultimately didn’t make it the whole year. I’ve started taking the photos as of yesterday. Like I said above, the new blog (WP with the Coppermine Integration plugin) will make inserting photos from the gallery quicker and easier, so I should be able to keep up with the whole thing without a whole load of fiddly copy-pasting and so on.
  • Be more structured in my posting in general – start doing the Friday Five again, for example, so that I know that I have specific things to be posting about, rather than a big blank space to fill with randomness. Not that randomness is bad… I just want more of a mixture of, er, stuff.
  • Therefore, try to be posting 2 – 3 times a week:
    1. A weekly Project 365 update.
    2. The Friday Five, or some other meme or similar that makes me think a bit.
    3. And most importantly, knitting / spinning / other stuff content. All the stuff I usually post, but more regularly, and with photos more often, and … things. Hopefully some things about the course I’m starting soon on Bipolar. We’ll see how it goes.

I think all that’s do-able and should be fun. I have to get the new website version up and running first, of course, but I pretty much have all the background stuff for that done now. It’s just a matter of importing the content from the old site version and making any edits that I want… and there are bound to be lots of those since I haven’t done any actual updates on this site in forever. The thing that will probably take the longest will be importing the several hundred entries from this blog – I’ve actually already done the old-old one (“So Far So Good”) and that went well enough. I’m trying to decide what to do about redirecting the old pages to the new ones… it’s going to be fiddly so I think I might not bother on the most part. This is hardly a big-name website, after all. My own internal links can be done gradually and I can set up some redirections for pages I know have outside links, like my Knitting Patterns category. If I find I get a lot of hits looking for anything in particular, I can sort it out then. I think that’s the most stress-free way of going about it.

Fibrey goodness

Recently, I’ve been spinning as much as knitting. Jo has lent me her spare spinning wheel which is an Ashford Kiwi and I’ve been having lots of fun with it. I still need lots of practice, and so far I’m using some of the fibre that came with my drop spindle. There’s no fear of me running out of stuff to spin, though: even before Jo lent me her wheel, I had some of the yummy fibre from her Etsy shop. I now have six 100g-ish braids of hers, and I’ll post some pics here soon. Not right now though, because I’m about to upgrade my photo gallery as a prelude to the whole site upgrade – which should be quite soon now! I’ve got some really gorgeous colours in BFL and Merino, and the Merino/Tencel is even more delicious, but you’ll just have to take my word for it until the upgrade is all done and dusted.

In other Etsy news, my friend Rae has opened her Etsy shop, Angel Rae Arts. She’s selling some very cool (and cute) fridge magnets. I love the buried treasure one (which is from a photo taken when she was visiting me a few years ago!), and also the caffeinated cat one (painted) which really reminds me of the Xandermog. *g* The original one’s been sold already, but she’s done some more that aren’t identical, but very similar. Yay!

Fixed it!

Mostly ;-) But the point is, bloggy service is restored, and the comments should be working again as well. I’m not sure where the Typekey authentication part has gone to, but I’m going to look into that tomorrow. This whole site really needs stripping back to the bare code, so I shall get on to that tomorrow, I expect.
Now, I’m off to bed!

Shiny newness

There’s something new around here. What could it be? *g* Nothing all that exciting actually, except a little bit to me in a geeky way: I finally got around to upgrading to Movable Type 4.1. Which is nice. You can’t tell much difference from here, except that the Blogroll didn’t upgrade and so now all my links are a horrible blobby mess. There are a couple of ways I could sort that out, but the quickest might be to go back to using Blogrolling for now.

The actual reason I finally did the upgrade is that I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around on Facebook (and I really do mean playing: I’ve installed a load of irritating page-heavy apps so I can play silly games. Sorry, Facebook flist!) recently. One of the things I installed was the ‘Blog It‘ app, which should let me crosspost to various places including here and my LJ, as well as update my Facebook and Twitter statuses. I know, spammity-spam-spam, make me stop. Anyhow, even though it’s a Six Apart developed app, it doesn’t want to work for this MT blog… and still doesn’t even after the upgrade and me trying a billionty different things. Ah well. So much for that. For now. :-)

If you want to friend me on Facebook, by the way, I should be searchable. I’m using my usual email for this site over there as well, and if you can’t find me with that, drop me a line or a comment here and I’ll send you some more details.

What else was I going to say? Oh yes: it’s WWKIP Day tomorrow, and I’m going to the event in Brighton. Hopefully Ms Charlotte is coming down too. Knitting-wise, I’ve reassessed what’s a current project and what’s hibernated, and I’ve cast on for the February Lady Sweater (actually a cardigan). It’s the first time I’ve tried top-down all-in-one-piece construction, and I’m very excited. No, that’s not sarcasm – I really am! There will be no seams! I might actually finish it relatively quickly instead of finishing the knitting part and then stuffing the parts in a bag to languish for years! Poor poor Chunky Jacket and Menace Jumper. I will finish you one day!