Coredump

(Hello. It's been a while since my last post. I mostly post on Twitter , Facebook and identi.ca now. I also maintain two "mini-blogs" on Tumblr and Posterous . My two loyal readers should head over there, follow my social network accounts, or subscribe to my aggregator . * hint, hint * :D Anyway...) I've been meaning to fold in posts from my two mini-blogs to Coredump, but exclude them in the feeds, since I plan on adding them to my aggregated lifestream . I still haven't found a good solution short of adding a new category (I don't like cluttering my too-many categories {all three of them!}) or mucking around with Wordpress' add_filter in functions.php (which will likely get lost when I update WP). So I ended up focusing on the feed itself. I've already set up a Feedburner feed long ago, when it was still *just* Feedburner and hadn't been eaten up by the Borg^H^H^H^HGoogle. I can add the feed URL as a link meta in the header, but that's...

Quick bits of status updates: Updated Coredump to WP 2.6.5, which fixes an XSS exploit vulnerability and some bugs . Since I installed using SVN, the update was a trivial svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.5/ . and a visit to /wp-admin . Updated my WordPress sandbox to 2.7-beta3-9909. Again, I use the SVN trunk so updating was a breeze. Upgraded one of my boxes, marty , to Fedora 10 . Now, upgrading Fedora is always a bit more involved. I had to clean up the old yum cache (using yum clean all ; point yum to the new release; do a yum upgrade ; and a final package-cleanup --orphans to check for un-updated packages. After that, I pointed grub to the newly installed kernel ( 2.6.27.5-117.fc10 ), and rebooted. The new boot screen takes some getting used to, but the box boots surprisingly quick (~30 seconds? I did not check). And voila! I'm on Cambridge.

A nifty feature on WordPress 2.7-'hemorrhage' , Plugin Browser/Installer, lets you to select and install plugins from a web browser. There's no need for the typical download-unzip(-FTP, if you don't have shell access) workflow that we currently have. You can search using plugin names and descriptions, tags, or author. Once you find the plugin you need, installing it is just a matter of clicking on the link. The link provides the description of the plugin, much like what's available through the WordPress plugin directory. You can even activate the plugin from the same popup overlay. Speaking of the nightly build, the dashboard sports a new look -- sidebars instead of header tabs:

The first WordCamp Philippines will be held on September 6. Spearheaded by the Mindanao Bloggers , it will feature tracks in deploying WP as well as themes and plugins development. Registration is free -- all you have to do is blog about your intent to join the event. The event, which is set to be held at the College of St. Benilde in Manila, is sponsored by the following: i.PH: the Domain for Individuals Free Online Flash Games Wazzup Manila Philippines Real Estate CRM Real Estate Website Designers Orange County Real Estate Auto Insurance Quotes Lane Systems Inc. RedMedia Orange County Business Lawyer Cebu Pacific Air Buddy Gancenia Reality TV SmartBro Wireless Broadband SPOT.ph Make Money with Performancing Ads

You'll probably notice the cool Flash tag cloud on the sidebar. That's courtesy of Roy Tanck's WP-Cumulus plugin . Thanks, @sofimi for the heads up. I'm still on K2 (RC3), but I've ditched its Sidebar Manager for WP's widgets. SBM has been causing lots of issues for me lately, but I haven't had the time to muck around it. (When did I ever have time for anything, anyway? ;)) It's working fine in my sandbox, though -- well, RC5 at least, but I'm not that keen on porting my tweaks yet to that release. I haven't been posting here lately. Like a few other bloggers I know, Twitter (and FriendFeed ) has been the choice for posting "lifestream" tidbits. But, heck, I don't even use Twitter that much now (prolly, the IT sec audit at work has something to do with it, heh).

I'm writing this on a mobile phone using the wp-admin phone interface plugin, WPhone . The experience is quite painful -- it's not meant for the usual mobile phone browser, but rather for richer ones (in both the functional and, er, economical sense). I'm better off using other means, like email-to-blog perhaps. Update: I take that back. Well, the part about posting using the mobile admin interface, anyway -- that is still not usable and there are better ways of doing it. But other simple admin tasks (like activating or deactivating a plugin, for example) can be quite easy using the mobile interface. For example, I was able to activate the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, and was able to see the result right away. There's still the matter of having the plugin there in the first place though. Hmmm, SSH on S60 should be next in my list.

Coredump's Archives page is borked. My move from 2.2x to 2.3.1 updated the WP tables. However, since I'm using a "legacy" theme, the table references (particularly to wp_categories ) hosed that page. The table wp_categories has been supplanted by wp_terms , wp_term_relationships , and wp_term_taxonomy . Nothing that a simple SQL query change can't remedy. So instead of SELECT COUNT(1) FROM $wpdb->categories I wrote SELECT COUNT(1) FROM $wpdb->term_taxonomy WHERE taxonomy='category' Still broken, though. I need to change this theme real soon. Unfortunately, I don't have the time nor the energy. *sigh* I guess I'd have to endure with this for a few more days (hopefully not weeks).

"Dexter" being Wordpress 2.3 , of course. I had to back out of upgrading to 2.3 for Coredump for one reason: tags. I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and apparently, it is incompatible with 2.3 because of the new version's native tag support. There's an import facility, but I'd have to think it over first. See, I broke my blog using Dreamhost 's one-click install. Not Dreamhost's fault, but mine: overeager me just blindly used it without deactivating UTW first. Good thing it was easy to revert to a previous version. For now, I'm testing the waters by using, tadah, 2.4-bleeding in my sandbox. I'm thinking of changing the theme anyway so might as well go the whole hog. Not that I don't like K2 anymore, but the blue Kubrick look is getting a bit old and stale for me. I have weekly Wordpress database backups and the shell is just a few keystrokes away, so I'm not really afraid when things break again.

Well, almost. Dreamhost's one-click install was pretty straightforward. Backing up and restoring the WP database went smoothly as well. (Thanks to my regular backup strategy .) Replacing the theme and the plugins are still in process. I've managed to put back the site's look to its former layout, with not-quite-a-few tweaks in the CSS and theme files. I haven't installed all plugins yet, but the more important ones (like Akismet) are in place. A few minor hiccups: the flickrRSS plugin would have to be suspended for now as I have yet to tweak the CSS that places my Flickr thumbnails neatly in the sidebar. I'm still trying to understand this new widget functionality. I can't seem to add custom sidebar entries using K2, because manually editing sidebar.php apparently doesn't work. My hosted images (I failed to note that I also have Gallery installed!) are nowhere to be found. Good thing I also created backups for that. The more important blog features: The R...

I'll be doing some major maintenance for Coredump . I'm currently on Dreamhost , and it has these one-click installs that have one-click upgrades, too, which is cool. Thing is, I did that one-click thingie using iandexter.tambay.org, and I just used some nifty mod_url_rewrite snippet to redirect the WP install there to iandexter.net. The one-click upgrade doesn't work for these transferred domains, so I had to manually copy over files from the old domain to the new one -- very tedious. What I'm planning to do: Back up the WP install in both iandexter.net and iandexter.tambay.org. Remove the contents of iandexter.net (required for the one-click install). Do that one-click-install thingamajig. Restore the WP database to the new install. Remove the install in iandexter.tambay.org. Looks pretty easy, except, for step 1. I also have to disable plugins, save the theme modifications I did (hmmm... maybe it's time for a new theme? But K2 works great for me!), an...

I'm an O.C. and a paranoid (bad combination, I know), and I've learned from experience that there's nothing like a good backup strategy to cover your bases. So I regularly back everything up, but unlike Linus, I don't have a readily available FTP server to do that. I do have a GMail account, though, so that's the next best thing. Below is my script to back up Coredump's SQL database: #!/bin/sh DBNAME=database_name DBUSER=username DBPASS=password DBHOST=database_host EMAIL="[email protected]" SUBJECT="SQLbackup" mysqldump --opt -u $DBUSER -p$DBPASS -h $DBHOST $DBNAME > backup.sql gzip -9 backup.sql DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`; mv backup.sql.gz backup-$DATE.sql.gz echo 'SQL backup is attached.' | mutt $EMAIL -s $SUBJECT -a backup-$DATE.sql.gz rm backup-$DATE.sql.gz Change the user information above (from wp-config.php ), chmod 711 the script, and plug it in crontab like so: @weekly $HOME/path/to/script >/dev/null 2>&1 In GMail, cr...