by Sujoy on April 20, 2008
There has been a notifier above my dashboard for quite some time. Initially, I had just ignored it. But it was quite some time now and I thought, a Sunday afternoon would be good to upgrade to the latest WordPress version. I had a 2.3 version running and had plans of upgrading to the latest 2.5 version. So, the first thing I did was search on the instructions. Apparently I didn’t need to search for it. I clicked the link to download the new version from the WordPress page and it redirected me to a page, with links on the official guide to Upgrade. It even contained links to fully install the new version or upgrade to the new version. I’ll be telling you the instructions in as detailed steps as possible, but first, let’s first consider why it is necessary at all to take the pain of upgrading.
Firstly, I heard Blog indexing websites like Technorati are leaving behind sites which have older WordPress versions. Apart from that, there is the obvious reason of trying out something spanking new and be a member of the New League of the New WordPress users. And yes, the new Dashboard is a welcome change. Although, there are some flaws and shortcomings which I’ll discuss eventually. So, anyway here are the steps to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.
Step 1: Ensure that you have backed up your WordPress DB. How to do that? Check out my post on it here and the things to remember while backing up post. Keep it ready, just in case anything goes wrong. If possible keep a back-up of your wp-content folder. This is very necessary as you might need it in case you deleted it by mistake. Also keep a copy of the wp-config.php file. This contains the information to connect to your DB. This shouldn’t be a problem as the new WordPress folder will have a wp-config-sample.php file. Anyway, so you should have all your back-ups ready. [Continue Reading]
by Sujoy on March 21, 2008
It is quite essential to regularly back up your blog data. More so when you are hit with a bad weather in your servers. That is when you see the whole world crumbling down. Imagine me, when my servers crashed and I had no access to the c-panel and neither could I ftp to the servers as well. And yes, I was without a single back up of my more than 30 posts on Techkeyla, and another 50 I believe on OneKnightStands. That’s when you actually start re-reading your posts, in a state of hallucination that is. So to avoid such levels of trauma in the blogging world, back up is a must.
Now there are quite a bit of plugins in WordPress which offer similar features and facilities. I found this one to be quite simple to use, very fast and with all the necessary tools needed. It is called , shockingly WordPress backup, and the link is here. http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/
How to install: Download the zp file from going to the link here. Extract the zip file to a local folder and have the php file uploaded in your plugins folder of your wordpress folder. It should be inside :wp-content.
Now once it is uploaded, go to your WordPress admin console and go to the plugins tab. Hit Activate to activate the plugin and voila, job is done, but not yet. Next is to actually back up your DB. So, go to Manage–> Backup.
It should now show you a page with Backup options as to where you want to back up. The options are – On the server in a folder, download it to your local machine, or email it to a specified address.
Besides these, you can also set the Scheduled Backup. Most of us have daily posts, so an hourly backup doesn’t make much sense.A weekly backup also might face the risk of running behind a couple of posts. To be noted: You need to give write permissions for wp-content folder to enable Back Up files to be saved.
P.S. Do a manual back up once in a while, just to make sure that your data doesn’t vanish if your auto-backups fail.
Tip of the Day: If you have a Gmail ID, which I believe all of us do, set the filter for the given mails sent as backup attachments and you’ll have an arranged inbox of your backups. And the backup files are in a gun zipped SQL, and have convenient naming conventions and their date of backup can be easily identified . Happy Blogging!
Thanks to Brajeshwar for all the help in backing up my blogs.
Pics Courtesy:Jbiljr
by Sujoy on January 26, 2008
I am an avid Firefox user. There’s absolutely no existence of the IE on my machine in terms of usage. And well, I also use Flock, which is again a Firefox based browser. And what hooked me to Firefox at the first place was the Tab Browsing facility. With time, we all got so used to it, that we ran out of control while pressing the Ctrl+T button, and the number of tabs ran to 15 and upwards. That’s when browsing between tabs raises an issue. You can of course surf through them by the old trick-using the Ctrl+Tab button. Or perhaps putting in Ctrl+<Number of Tab> to jump directly to the desired Tab. But that limits it to only 9 tabs. What if it’s more than that?Here’s the remedy. [Continue Reading]
by Sujoy on January 23, 2008
This one comes in really handy when you design or redesign your site layouts. Specially with so many free WordPress layouts available, it is absolutely mandatory for all bloggers to keep in mind about the end user browsing experience, in terms of the layout being stable (Techkeyla had a few problems-the sidebars had all scrolled down to the bottom, as IE doesn’t believe in resizing the images to fit the width. Had to resize them myself). But then, we cannot install all the possible browsers available and of course, not test them on multiple OS-s as well. Now, here’s the perfect solution to a complicated problem. Browsershots.org. This site enables you to test your site/blog on multiple browsers and their multiple versions available across three OS-s,viz. Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Among the listed browsers are Firefox, Opera, MS IE, Kazehakase, Epiphany, Firebird, Flock, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Phoenix, Safari, BonEcho, GranParadiso, Galeon, Konqueror, Minefield,K-Meleon and Navigator.Here in the picture above, I tried testing Techkeyla across multiple browsers and it seems to be quite consistent in display. [Continue Reading]
