pixel blog

So the other day my webserver was moved to a new cluster. Things seemed fine until I had a poke around inside the Gallery and I discovered that thousands of symbolic links to image files are now invalid!

Contacted support, but there’s nothing much they can do. I can’t see how the links are set up, but on the basis that they aren’t working… I’m supposing that they include the path from the root. Since my home directory is now different to what it was on the other cluster, the old path points some place that doesn’t exist.

The process of building the galleries took days (I’d worked on it for hours at a time at various stages while I was away), and it’s not a pleasant thoght to have to mostly start over. The images themselves do exist in my filespace,  so I’m going to ee if I can replace the (currenlty broken) links with new links or with actual files, perhaps by removing the directories containing the links and moving/renaming the directories containing the files to Gallery’s data directory. Unfortunately the directory names are not the same (due to Gallery disallowing some of the characters), so it isn’t going to be a straightforward process.

Meanwhile, I’m learning C# .Net at the moment. I think it is going to take a while.

-G.

Posted in: Books, C#, Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: .Net, Gallery, symbolic links

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It seems that the transfer of my account to a PHP5 cluster has been successful… test Typo3 installation up-and-running. Had a bit of a hiccup along the way, though – neglected to update the DNS entries to point my domain(s) to the new address! Sorted now — subpixels.com live(s)! :o)

-G.

Posted in: Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: CMS, DNS, PHP5, Typo3

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I’ve been thinking about trying out a content management system (I mean, other than this WordPress blog!), as I’ve recently been frustrated with keeping some records ‘by hand’, as it were. On the upside, I’ve had some practise with creating HTML pages that I haven’t had for a while. I started out with my (reasonably) trusty text editor, gVim. A hang-over from my previous job as a programmer using vi/vim for a few years… you definitely do get used to that sort of editor! I still get caught out hitting escape, typing letters and such to try to issue ‘commands’, which doesn’t often work out so well in a regular editor!

In any case, I had a rather large document, and it was getting painful. When I decided I wanted to do some formatting with CSS, it seemed clear that using Dreamweaver would be a lot easier… so I’ve been playing with that for a few days. There certainly seem to be quite a  few annoying glitches about it, as an editor, considering how ‘mature’ a product it is (not to mention to price), but I suppose you get that. It has made things a little easier, but doesn’t completely address the issue of collecting information from various sources and trying to document  and present them consistently. Just what a Content Management System should do!

I saw mention of an installer script on my website host for a product called Typo3 and, after having a look at some details on their website started to get a bit excited (carried away,  maybe?) and went to run the autoinstaller on my site… Where is it? The Autoinstaller page lists a whole bunch of things, but not Typo3. Support ticket sent… and soon answered (within minutes!). Apparently Typo3 requires PHP5, and my site is on a cluster running PHP4, but good news is it can be moved. Yay! Might be up to 24 hours downtime, but otherwise not a problem. Yay!

And now… to be ‘quiet’ (stop making changes to the site) so they can move it. Shhhh!

-G.

Posted in: Site Maintenance by subpixel /
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It didn’t escape my attention that the autoinstaller for WordPress supplied by my host, servage.net (nb: link includes my customer code to ‘earn free hosting’…), was out of date at the time I did the installation. When viewing the admin pages it reminded me constantly that an update was available, and that there were urgent security fixes…

Yeah, okay, so maybe someone could hack my shiny new blog. Millions might die! Maybe not, but if for nothing other than to see what it would actually take, I decided to go through the process.

Turns out that, if you haven’t installed a bunch of plugins (and at thos stage I don’t know what they possibly entail), it is pretty easy. One configuration file to keep track of (which you don’t especially need to worry about being overwritten, as the default file has a different name), and the contents of another directory (the uploaded images/whatever content). It does seem a bit silly, though, that this directory is not in the WordPress root – sense would suggest that having any non-WordPress-specific files as separate as possible.

I also backed up the MySQL database beforehand. While reading about that I found my way to an auto backup script, AutoMySQLBackup hosted on SourceForge.net, which I had a browse through and found a bug… so of course now I have a new SourceForge account – yet another thing I don’t need to keep track of, though perhaps it will encourage me to start a project!

At any rate, when all said and done… my blog seems to appear just as before, and this post will (hopefully!) prove to me that it is still kinda working. :o)

-G.

Posted in: Databases, Site Maintenance, Software by subpixel / Tags: MySQL, servage.net, SourceForge, unix script, WordPress

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The pixel blog is maketh-ed. I don’t really feel like learning a whole bag of stuff about WordPress right now, so ’tis going to look hell boring for a while.

I’ve just spent a bunch of time reporting a user to WordPress.com and updating long-ish HTML documentation about them – I decided to add an index, which took longer than expected. Perhaps it is a lesson to come up with a decided document format before starting next time… maybe use this one as a template.

-G.

Posted in: Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: documentation, WordPress

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