Apologies if you were trying to read this site this morning and you had problems.
I was doing an upgrade of this site this morning from WordPress 1.5 Gamma (03/02/05) to WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn and I ran into a problem.
This blog is not in the WordPress folder but a folder called tom - hence tomandpilar.net/tom. WordPress is pointed at the tom folder and this doesn’t cause any problems. However, after upgrading I discovered that WordPRess was using the index.php file in the tom folder as opposed to the index.php file in the theme folder - which is what it should use in WordPress 1.5, and what it had been using in 1.5 Gamma.
After a bit of head scratching, re-reading Podz upgrade instructions, and the instructions on how to publish a blog in a different directory, I decided to try uploading the the wp-blog-header.php file from my backup.
I deleted the wp-blog-header.php from the remote site, uploaded the backup I made before I started from my own machine et voila, my blog returned to normal look and functionality once more.
This was a little scarey, though because I didn’t find mention of this potential issue anywhere in the WordPress Support Forums and the instructions for upgrading specifically state to delete the old wp-blog-header.php and replace it with the new one.
I’ll be interested to see if anyone else has this problem.
This site is currently undergoing an upgrade from WordPress 1.5 Gamma to WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn - please bear with me if there are any inconsistencies or errors.
Should be completed shortly.
Tom
WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn) - the long anticipated upgrade to one of the world’s most popular blogging applications has been released today.
Installation and upgrade (from previous version) instructions are available on the WordPress site.
There are also very comprehensive upgrade instructions available on Podz site.
Enjoy!
A client contacted me recently because their copy of ISA Server was failing to publish two new websites they had in their data center behind the ISA Server firewall.
I called in to have a look and at first glance everything seemed to have been configured correctly. However, when I checked the public IP addresses of the sites I discovered that they had been transposed when they were entered in the Web Listeners in ISA Server 2004.
Once this was corrected, one of the sites came up immediately but the 2nd site still stubbornly refused to appear. A more detailed look at this site showed that the web address of the site had been entered in the Web Listener as www.domain,com instead of www.domain.com!
Now this was a simple mis-key and quickly and easily resolved but it occurs to me that this error should never have been allowed to happen. It is a trivial matter to validate entries in forms - surely, this field is always going to expect web addresses and they have a very definite format which is easy to test for. In the worst case, a quick “This entry has a comma in it, are you sure this is correct?” warning would have caught this before it ever presented problems.
Easy effective control of comment spam
MacManX posted a comment spam strategy on the WordPress Beta discussion site the other day which caught my attention.
In the post he said he uses a plugin called WP-HashCash. The main advantage of this plugin is “it requires no maintenance or intervention on my part, and it’s invisible to my readers”.
He went on to explain:
Intrigued at the prospect of a maintenance-free spam solution and taking him at his word on its efficacy, I have installed WP-HashCash and disabled Spam Karma.
I found I was having a couple of niggling issues with Spam Karma and since its developer, Dr. Dave, announced he has frozen development of Spam Karma, the decision to switch wasn’t a hard one.
I am combining this with the blacklist feature of WordPress 1.5 (which will require a little maintenance) and I am moderating comments until I am confident that WP-HashCash is the solution I have been looking for.
Roll on a spam-free blogging experience!