Failure is the Key to Success

I have been using Austin Matzko’s WordPress Database Backup plugin from shortly after I moved to WordPress about 3 years ago. Until the last week, it has been working perfectly on all my blogs where I use it. I have it set to email me daily the backup of my wordpress tables for each blog. That way I have a backup not stored on my server in case of emergencies.

However, I recently updated it to the new version on all blogs and at the same time it stopped sending me backup emails from this blog. It was working fine from the others, just not this one. I ran a backup manually and watched it create the backup, then instead of zipping it up and emailing, it just stopped.

I left Austin a message on his support forum and he responded the same day. I only saw the response when I checked today. While looking at the size of the backup files to answer one of his questions, I discovered that the size of the backup files were growing on a daily basis, by a significant amount. This caused me to check the size of the database tables that were being backed up.

The comments and commentmeta tables were a lot larger than I would have expected; then it hit me – spam comments! I have deleted over 1500 spam and optimised the tables and now the backup is working again. I’ll just have to keep an eye on the spam.

Tags:Wordpress Backup,wordpress plugins

Like a lot of other people, I came across a problem when trying to automatically upgrade my blogs to WordPress 2.9. My web host is 1and1 and the database that I had my blog in was a MySQL 4 database, specifically 4.0.27. The problem is, WordPress 2.9 needs 4.1.2 or 5 (I know its in the requirements, but I didn’t read them I just hit ‘upgrade automatically’). After finding this post by Don Campbell, What I Learned Upgrading to WordPress 2.9, I knew my best option was to change my database to a MySQL 5 one. Unfortunately, although I have two databases available to me on my hosting package, but I was using both and both were MySQL 4.

I checked all the applications I had using the database (PhpGedView, Gallery and phpBB) to confirm they were all able to work with MySQL 5, and found they were. That’s a good start! I already knew WordPress was OK, so I set about exporting the tables for each of my blogs and applications to file ready to import into another database. The tables for Firestats were the largest and a couple of them had to be exported individually, otherwise phpAdmin choked.

Continue reading » Upgrading to WordPress 2.9

Tags:1 and 1,FireStats,MySQL,upgrading Wordpress,Wordpress 2.9

I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 on one of my test blogs a few days ago using the new automatic upgrade feature. The upgrade went quickly and smoothly and everything worked afterwards, so that was good.

Tonight, I got round to upgrading my other test blogs and they didn’t go well at all.

Initially on 2 of them I got as far as “Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip” and that was all; it just sat there doing nothing. OK, so I looked on the forums and saw a suggestion that it might be plugin related, so I disabled all the plugins on one of the blogs, this then got to the next stage “Unpacking the core update” and sat there doing nothing. Hmm, this was strange it worked on the first blog. I tried the update on my last test blog and this worked automatically in seconds. The mystery deepens!

Then I had a thought, back in July, when I was working on the problem with Firestats, I found a resolution by adding a line to my .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Continue reading » Upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1

Tags:.htaccess file,FireStats,PHP 5,upgrading Wordpress,wordpress 2.7.1

A couple of weeks back I talked about adding a plugin to convert my blog to be viewable on mobile devices.

After I had activated the plugin, I checked the site using the page check at ready.mobi and found that the pages created by the plugin had some statements missing and some other errors. By using the helpful guidelines on the site, I was able to modify the Main Index Template (index.php) in the WordPress Mobile Edition Theme.

Continue reading » Going Mobile Part 2

Tags:mobileok,ready.mobi,w3c mobileok validator,wordpress mobile edition

A while back, when I got my new work mobile, I checked out my blog using the WAP browser. The blog was visible, but as it was faithfully reproduced, it meant that I had to scroll all over the place to see it. This was obviously not the best approach for mobile users.

I’ve had a look around at WordPress plugins and tried out two, WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King and WordPress Mobile by Andy Moore. I used the demo of Opera Mini to assist me in my testing.

Continue reading » Going Mobile

Tags:alex king,FireStats,twitter tools,wordpress mobile edition,wordpress plugins

While checking Google Webmaster Tools I discovered that all the links to my library (bottom of right sidebar) had failed.

The Now Reading plugin that I use for my library requires Permalinks to be set to ‘Custom’ for it to work. Permalinks are what allow this post to have a URL like http://blog.ijhedges.com/2008/11/03/fixed-library-links instead of http://blog.ijhedges.com/p=379. In this case combined with the rewrite in the plugin they allow my library to appear to to be here http://blog.ijhedges.com/library/ .

I can only guess one of the WordPress updates reset this. I’ll have to keep an eye on it in the future after upgrades.

Tags:now reading,wordpress permalinks