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.

Once I had all the tables, I started by importing the tables for one of my test blogs back into my other MySQL 4 database as a temporary measure. Modifying the wp-config.php file for the blog with the credentials for that database changed the blog to using the other database. I repeated for each of my WordPress blogs. Uploading a couple of the Firestats tables was painful; I had to copy and paste sections of the exported data, which was in the format of insert commands, the entire table was too big to import in one go. Eventually the blogs and statistics were completed and working on the other database. The same exercise was done for the Gallery tables and the config.php file was modified to point to the alternate database. The tables for PhpGedView were imported and then by logging in to the admin functions the database could be changed (set the config.php file back to read only once finished). phpBB was similar with the config.php file being modified. I then changed the password on the original database and made sure everything still worked; I was sure nothing was using it, but wanted to be doubley sure before deleting it. Once I knew it wasn’t used, I deleted the MySQL 4 database and created a MySQL 5 database in its place.

Rinse and repeat! The tables for my test blog that I had just moved to the temporary database were imported to the new MySQL 5 database and the wp-config.php file modified with the new credentials. The test blog worked! Yes, looking good!

After this I tried again to upgrade my test blog to 2.9, it went successfully then I got an error when trying to go to the dashboard. On examination it was a message about the WeatherIcon plugin, so I renamed the plugin and got back into the dashboard. After googling WeatherIcon and WordPress 2.9, I came across Fixing WeatherIcon plugin for WordPress 2.9-rare (alpha nightlies) which gave me the fix needed to get the plugin working again.

While checking out all the functions, I found that I was unable to logon to Firestats from within WordPress 2.9. I could put my username and password into the login box and press the login button, but the button didn’t seem to do anything. I am running Firestats in satellite mode, which means that I only have one upload of the application rather than one per blog. My other blogs using the MySQL database were able to login to Firestats without any problem, so it was either a WordPress 2.9 or MySQL 5 issue. I migrated the tables from another test blog onto the new database and confirmed that it was still able to log into Firestats. OK, looking like a Firestats and WordPress 2.9 problem. I could monitor Firestats by logging onto my stats site and accessing all sites data from there, including the WordPress 2.9 blog. The WordPress 2.9 blog is still updating the database with its hits since the upgrade. I logged a ticket on the Firestats site and Omry responded quickly(, although I only saw it yesterday). Testing on a clean WordPress install with only Firestats had shown Firestats to work fine, so maybe it was another of my plugins causing the problem and I should try disabling plugins.

So, yesterday I tried disabling all plugins on my test blog except Firestats and sure enough it was fine. OK, on to the plugins. I started enabling them one by one (and closing the browser so that it forced the logon to Firestats each time) and ran into the problem when I enabled WordPress Database Backup. That wasn’t looking good, I consider that to be a key plugin. Then I had a thought and disabled a couple of the ‘working’ plugins and then re-enabled WordPress Database Backup, it worked, hmm something strange going on here. It had turned out to be the number of plugins I was running, or more accurately the amount of memory they used. I use shared hosting on 1and1 and they restrict php memory limit to 20MB. I must have been close to the limit on WordPress 2.8; WordPress 2.9 uses about 0.85MB more and so pushed me over the limit. By turning off one of the less critical plugins to reduce the memory usage, it is now working fine.

All my blogs have now been migrated to WordPress 2.9 and seem to be working fine.

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

This causes php pages to processed by my host 1and1 using PHP 5 instead of PHP 4. Looking at the test blogs that had worked, both had this line in the .htaccess file. Ah, could it be this simple?

I downloaded a copy of the .htaccess file from one of the failing blogs and wasn’t happy to find that WordPress (I guess) had reset it to the default file with only the WordPress rewrite section. Anyway, I added my redirects back in and added the line for PHP 5 and uploaded it.

The automatic update then worked fine. I did the same for the other failing test blog, which also had a default .htaccess file (I’m glad I keep copies) and that also worked. So it looks like the automatic upgrade works with PHP 5 and not with PHP 4

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.

The original file contained:

<html>
<head>
<title><?php wp_title(‘|’); ?></title>
<meta name=”HandheldFriendly” value=”true” />
<style><!– @import url(<?php print(get_stylesheet_uri()); ?>); // –></style>
</head>

<body>

<h3><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></h3>

<hr />

<p>
<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>”>Home</a> |
<a href=”#recent”>Recent Posts</a> |
<a href=”#pages”>Pages</a>
</p>

<hr />

<?php

$parent = 0;
$i = 0;

have_posts();

if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) :
the_post();
if (is_single() || $wp_query->is_single || $wp_query->is_singular) {
if (!is_page()) {
?>
<p>&laquo; <?php next_post(‘%’, ‘Next: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> | <?php previous_post(‘%’, ‘Previous: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> &raquo;</p>
<?php
}
?>

<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

<p><?php _e(‘Posted in: ‘); the_category(‘, ‘); ?></p>

<?php
the_content();
if ($wp_query->is_page && !is_home()) {
$parent = $post->ID;
?>

<p>Posted by <?php the_author(); ?><br /><?php the_time(‘F jS, Y @ g:i A’) ?></p>

<?php
}
comments_template();
if (!is_page()) {
?>
<p>&laquo; <?php next_post(‘%’, ‘Next: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> | <?php previous_post(‘%’, ‘Previous: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> &raquo;</p>
<?php
}
}
else {
if ($i == 0) {
if (is_category()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php single_cat_title(”); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_day()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts on: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘l, F jS, Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_month()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘F, Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_year()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_search()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Results for: ‘); ?><?php print(htmlspecialchars($s)); ?></h1>
<?php
}
print(‘<ul>’);
}
$i++;
?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a> <?php the_time(“Y-m-d”); ?></li>
<?php
if ($i == count($posts)) {
print(‘</ul>’);
}
}
endwhile;
endif;
?>

<hr />

<h2 id=”recent”><?php _e(‘Recent Posts’); ?></h2>

<?php ak_recent_posts(10); ?>

<hr />

<h2 id=”pages”><?php _e(‘Pages’); ?></h2>

<ul>
<?php
wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1&child_of=’.$parent);
?>
</ul>

<hr />

<p>
<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>”>Home</a> |
<a href=”#recent”>Recent Posts</a> |
<a href=”#pages”>Pages</a>
</p>

<hr />

<p><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘wpurl’); ?>/wp-admin/options-general.php?ak_action=reject_mobile”>Exit the Mobile Edition</a> (view the standard browser version).</p>

<hr />

<p>Powered by <a href=”http://wordpress.org”><strong>WordPress</strong></a>. <a href=”http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress”>WordPress Mobile Edition</a> available at alexking.org.</p>

</body>
</html>

by deleting a single element from the original and adding a few elements or modifying those already there, it now looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN” “http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<title><?php wp_title(‘|’); ?></title>

<meta http-equiv=”Cache-Control” content=”max-age=200″ />
<style type=”text/css”><!– @import url(<?php print(get_stylesheet_uri()); ?>); // –></style>
</head>

<body>

<h1><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></h1>

<hr />

<p>
<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>”>Home</a> |
<a href=”#recent”>Recent Posts</a> |
<a href=”#pages”>Pages</a>
</p>

<hr />

<?php

$parent = 0;
$i = 0;

have_posts();

if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) :
the_post();
if (is_single() || $wp_query->is_single || $wp_query->is_singular) {
if (!is_page()) {
?>
<p>&laquo; <?php next_post(‘%’, ‘Next: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> | <?php previous_post(‘%’, ‘Previous: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> &raquo;</p>
<?php
}
?>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php _e(‘Posted in: ‘); the_category(‘, ‘); ?></p>

<?php
the_content();
if ($wp_query->is_page && !is_home()) {
$parent = $post->ID;
?>

<p>Posted by <?php the_author(); ?><br /><?php the_time(‘F jS, Y @ g:i A’) ?></p>

<?php
}
comments_template();
if (!is_page()) {
?>
<p>&laquo; <?php next_post(‘%’, ‘Next: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> | <?php previous_post(‘%’, ‘Previous: ‘, ‘yes’); ?> &raquo;</p>
<?php
}
}
else {
if ($i == 0) {
if (is_category()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php single_cat_title(”); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_day()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts on: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘l, F jS, Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_month()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘F, Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_year()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Posts in: ‘); ?><?php the_time(‘Y’); ?></h1>
<?php
}
else if (is_search()) {
?>
<h1><?php _e(‘Results for: ‘); ?><?php print(htmlspecialchars($s)); ?></h1>
<?php
}
print(‘<ul>’);
}
$i++;
?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a> <?php the_time(“Y-m-d”); ?></li>
<?php
if ($i == count($posts)) {
print(‘</ul>’);
}
}
endwhile;
endif;
?>

<hr />

<h2 id=”recent”><?php _e(‘Recent Posts’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php ak_recent_posts(10); ?>
</ul>

<hr />

<h2 id=”pages”><?php _e(‘Pages’); ?></h2>

<ul>
<?php
wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1&child_of=’.$parent);
?>
</ul>

<hr />

<p>
<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>”>Home</a> |
<a href=”#recent”>Recent Posts</a> |
<a href=”#pages”>Pages</a>
</p>

<hr />

<p><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘wpurl’); ?>/index.php?ak_action=reject_mobile”>Exit the Mobile Edition</a> (view the standard browser version).</p>

<hr />

<p>Powered by <a href=”http://wordpress.org”><strong>WordPress</strong></a>. <a href=”http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress”>WordPress Mobile Edition</a> available at alexking.org.</p>

</body>
</html>

According to the ready.mobi site, this now produces pages which are good – ‘It will probably display very well on a mobile phone.’ Many tests performed by ready.mobi are defined by the W3C in the MobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 document.

To confirm the pages were valid, I tried using the W3C mobileOK Checker, but was getting:

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /mobile/.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

I wondered if this was something to do with my ISP’s proxy server, but after testing various options, including trying from a different internet connection, I have concluded it must be an issue with the W3C mobileok validator site. I will have to try again at another time.

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.

WordPress Mobile

The installation was a straight forward copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and activate the plugin. Then under settings you can adjust some of the options including the predefined colour schemes. I chose blue to match with the general theme of my sites. The plugin has the functionality to add Admob Mobile Advertising and Google AdSense for Mobile adverts to the top and bottom of the pages, or at least it would have if the functions needed to make this work were enabled on my hosting.

It provided a clean rendering of the content of my site, by eliminating the sidebar contents and theme images. I did have problems with some errors at the top of the post pages:

Warning: imagesx(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1869

Warning: imagesy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1870

Warning: cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php:1869) in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 606

If you ignored the errors, the rest of the page loaded fine. Any comments on posts were shown on a separate link.

WordPress Mobile Edition

The installation caught me out, I should have read the readme file. You have to copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and the wp-mobile folder to the themes folder, then activate the plugin. There are no settings to adjust, it just works.

Again, it also produce a clean, uncluttered version of my site by eliminating the same things. One thing I did like was that it included the comments to post on the same page and also displayed the Firestats extras (country, operating system and browser images) with the comment.

While I’m sure the issue with the errors on the post pages could have been resolved in the WordPress Mobile plugin, I don’t think it offered anything to me over the WordPress Mobile Edition one from Alex King. While checking out Alex King‘s site, I realised I was already using another of his plugins, Twitter Tools.

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.

I created a test install of WordPress at home to play around with and then started to look at the options for exporting my Thingamablog data. On the face of it, the data could be exported in XML format. However, the structure of the data wasn’t compatible with any of the import options. In the end, I imported the data into Excel, reformated it and created a new file in WordPress export format. This enabled me to import my posts into the test WordPress install.

Then the fun began… although the post content imported, the post dates didn’t carry over and some of the formatting didn’t work either. So, in the end I had to edit each post, correcting the post date and resolving the formatting. Some 250+ posts later and they were the same as the live blog. In hindsight, it would have been as easy to create each post fresh and edit it then, rather than spending the time with the import.

Then I had to add the comments individually. As they were all made by me and then edited to correct the time and author, the records of where they were posted from and what operating system & browser will be wrong.

I wanted a 3 column theme similar to what I was currently using and after trying several, I settled on Zen in Grey by Sajith M as a starting point. I didn’t make any changes at this time as I wanted to look at the available plugins for WordPress. After a lot of experimentation and thought, I settled on the following list of plugins:

• Akismet – built in comment spam protection
• AskApachePasswordProtect – additional password layer for access to wp-admin files. You have to enter username and password once each browser session.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith – Redirect to Feedburner for feed requests
• Firestats – blog statistics, integrates with comments for country, operating system and browser symbols
• Google XML Sitemaps – creates Google sitemaps when blog updated
• MyAvatars – adds MyBlogLog avatars to comments
• NoFollow Free – removes NoFollow from comments for regular commentators
• NowReading – Library / list of current books. I got this one from Gary‘s blog and have sent the creator Rob Miller his dues.
• Subscribe to Comments – adds a subscribe tick box to comments and allows you to manage your subscriptions
• Technorati Tags – converts the WordPress 2.3 new tag system to display in Technorati format
• Weathericon – provides current weather conditions
• wp-cache – caches requested pages to static files for quicker serving

Some of my other widgets like MyBlogLog and WeatherPixie had plugins available but I ended up using a text widget and adding the code.

Like previous sites, I tried to make this one standards compliant. The links are in the footer to validate for valid XHTML, CSS and RSS (a given as Feedburner provides it).

By this time, I was having to make changes to the theme to integrate some of the plugins, so I had taken a copy of the Zen in Grey theme and called it ijhedges. I was reasonably familiar with stylesheets and php, so it wasn’t too difficult to start making the changes. I also had to adjust the templates for now-reading, as it was designed for a 2 column theme. Just when I thought that I’d sorted the theme, I tried looking at the theme in Internet Explorer. AAGGGH! A few hacks and another stylesheet for Internet Explorer and I have a theme that functions in Internet Explorer as well.

Next, I needed a new header for the blog. I wanted to retain the image of O’Sensei in the header and found Prasit Imtanavanich’s waterdrop images on morgueFile. So, after a while I had my new header image.

Lastly, I have set up the .htaccess file to 301 redirect each old post to the corresponding new post.

I think it’s all working. Can you let me know what you think.

With my membership, I get to give a gift membership to someone else, so what I’ll do is the first person to request the gift membership in the comments will get it, just drop me an email after leaving your comment so that I have your email address, my address is on my contact me page.

I have looked at a few options:

Weather Underground

The WeatherUnderground widgets are clear and informative, providing the current weather and a link to check the forecast. If you click through to the WeatherUnderground website for forecasts, there is a lot of useful information, but the page also has a lot of adverts, it is annoying.

netWeather

<

Weather
Forecast

<

Weather
Forecast | Weather
Maps

The netWeather widget from Accuweather is nice, and reasonably customisable but relies on Javascript and sometimes is slow opening. Also, in testing it seemed to constantly contact the accuweather website.

Weather Pixie

While investigating another solution, I came across The Weather Pixie. It’s a bit quirky which I liked, and the figure I have used, Weatherboy6, looks (with a bit of imagination) a bit like me except he doesn’t have a beard and maybe he has a bit more hair on top. As the weather changes, the background changes and as the temperature changes, so do the clothes that the figure wears. The choice I’ve got to make is temperature, wind speed and pressure in imperial or metric. For me this is a problem, as I mentioned in my earlier post about UK weights and measures, I generally use imperial, so mph for wind speed and inches of mercury for pressure suit me best, but I use Celcius for temperature. I will use metric for the moment, let me know what you think. By the way, the time on the image is the update time, not the current time.

Let me know what you think and if I’ve really got it wrong and you can’t let me know in the comments, then you can let me know via my contact me page.

Thanks to David Airey for making me aware of a problem with my comments and suggesting the contact me page.