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Upgraded to WordPress 2.6

July 16, 2008

WordPress 2.6 was released two days ago and I’ve just upgraded this blog to that latest version. It was a painless process and worked fine.

Upgrading your blog platform requires some essential planning beforehand, notably backing up your database at the very least. WordPress has a handy upgrade guide which, if you follow all the steps, should result in a successful upgrade.

I do read that guide every time I upgrade. But for the last four upgrade versions of WordPress, I’ve upgraded everything with just one click.

Well, not quite. But I use a reliable service from DreamHost, my hosting provider, that literally does everything in one click. It has a snappy name - 1-Click Install.

So my upgrade path goes like this:

  1. Backup the database.
  2. Disable all plugins.
  3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Install and wait for email confirmation that upgrade done.
  4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plugins.

The only time I’ve ever had an issue with a WP upgrade via 1-Click Install is when I hadn’t disabled plugins before doing the upgrade. (I would have had that issue however I’d done the upgrade.)

There’s lots to discover about WordPress 2.6 especially new features like Google Gears support to speed up your blog admin, and enhancements for editing posts such as wiki-like version control, word count and adding captions to images.

Now that I’ve successfully upgraded, the most crucial thing for me at the moment is getting the answer to this question - does Windows Live Writer work with WordPress 2.6?

I write all my posts and pages in WLW - by far the best offline blog editor for Windows - including this one, so this post is testing that it works.

The reason that’s an important question is that WP 2.6 introduces a significant change, one that will affect offline editors like WLW.

The change concerns XML-RPC which, in very simple terms, affects whether your offline editor can connect to your blog or not. If XML-RPC is disabled, it can’t.

For fresh installations of WP 2.6, XML-RPC is disabled by default. For upgrades, like mine, it’s enabled.

Luckily, it’s a setting that’s easy to control yourself and you’ll find it in Admin > Settings > Writing:

wp26remote

Both Atom and XML-RPC are topics that have been talked about a bit in recent months in relation to WordPress development.

Anyway, I’m happy with how the upgrade to WP 2.6 went. Now to test whether this post publishes ok from Windows Live Writer…

[Post-publish edit] Yes, it did publish just fine, exactly as I was expecting. That means I’m comfortable going ahead with upgrading my main blog soon.

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Bad Behavior has bad behaviour

February 20, 2008

One of the plugins for WordPress that I’ve used for ages is Bad Behaviour.

Along with Akismet, this plugin is at the front line of defence against spam and other ugly stuff that hits your blog on a regular basis.

As with all plugins that I regard as essential, I tend to upgrade to the latest version as soon as I know there is one.

This was the case with BB 2.0.1.3, released in late January, which I installed the other day.

Then I noticed this paragraph in the text explaining fixes in this update:

A bug in Bad Behavior’s user agent blacklist code caused blacklist matches to become case-insensitive, when they should have been case-sensitive. Among other things, this caused pingbacks and trackbacks sent from WordPress blogs to fail. This has been fixed.

Bold emphasis is mine.

Wtf? Now I know the answer to something that’s been bothering me for the past month or so, which is that I got the feeling that outbound trackbacks just weren’t working.

A good test of that is when you write a post with a link to a published post in your own blog. In my WP blogs, that always generates a trackback.

But I’ve not seen any since around Jan 18 when I upgraded BB to the then-latest version 2.0.1.2.

And which means that the 40 or so posts I’ve written since then in my main blog which include lots of links to other blogs and websites, not a single trackback went to any of those places.

That is a real bummer. At least the bug is now fixed but I’m disappointed in BB.

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The spam switch-off

April 1, 2006

I’ve really neglected this blog. It’s still just a repository (so to speak) for the posts from the original NevOn Experimental blog hosted on TypePad.

While the blog has had no posting activity for the past few months, it’s had an awful lof of spam activity. I’ve just cleaned out the moderation queues - 218 spam comments and a whopping 1,696 spam trackbacks.

So I’ve just switched off all commenting and trackbacks site-wide. One of the beauties of Movable Type admin - you can do this.

So, still just a repository until I decide what to do with this blog. Regular blogging goes on at NevilleHobson.com.

Trying out Flock

November 15, 2005

I’m writing this post with Flock, the new browser that includes an extremely easy-to-use blog editor.

The software is not yet even beta - it’s sort of in-between alpha and beta - so you need to be prepared for some flakiness. Nothing so far gives any indication that this tool is less than polished and complete. But I’ve been using it for less than 30 minutes ;)

The blog editing functionality is very good. Configuring it to access this blog was very easy. Writing a draft post with the WYSIWIG editor and then publishing it was equally easy. The editor even includes a spell checker. Well, maybe that’s planned as clicking the spell button produced no action.

So, impressive. More later as I play with this.

TypePad to MT move done

November 6, 2005

I’ve just “switched off’ the original Nevon Experimental blog on TypePad. I’ll not be writing there any longer; where you are now is the new home - Nevon 2.0 Experimental.

Still quite a bit of work to do here but I decided that I might as well make this move now.

This is the simple move. The big one (to me, at least) will be moving NevOn, my primary blog, to NevOn 2.0, its new home based on WordPress. When that happens, the addresses of the blogs - that one and this one - will be the same mapped addresses that the current blogs use, which are mapped to the underlying TypePad addresses.

I expect to complete all this by 1 January 2006 or sooner.

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