Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

Lessons learned from a website meltdown

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

If you’re reading this, chances are better than average that you have your own blog. If so, then this article is worth  reading. In it, Roger Renteria describes a recent site meltdown he experienced and the lessons he learned. I think it’s time I updated my backups ….

Beware that moving a website like a WordPress blog is not an easy task if you don’t know the details regarding HTML, FTP, PHP, Apache Configuration, mySQL, Zone Files, A Records, and DNS. Thankfully the internet has instructions on fixing these issues that may arise as a result of trial and error.

DOWNLOAD AND  BACKUP EVERYTHING

First, I downloaded my entire site to my computer–images, directories, and files. Everything in the WordPress directory had to be downloaded. I also downloaded a backup copy of the mySQL database which WordPress operates from. These two items are what make up WordPress.

UPLOAD

Next, I uploaded the WordPress directory to my new hosting company. Also, I had to create a new database on my new host and import the data from the existing database I downloaded. These tasks were relatively simple and rather trouble-free.

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Free WordPress themes can be dangerous

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

If you use WordPress, you need to read this article. It turns out the 9 out the top 10 sites in a Google search for “free WordPress themes” are likely to result in you downloading a theme that’s either got encrypted code (can you spell “malware”), or contain hidden links to sites that you probably don’t want your readers visiting.

It’s a nasty and brutish world out there. Be careful.

8 out of 10 sites included base64 encoding in their themes. The average WordPress user no doubt knows that Google isn’t the best place to find themes but the stats on these sites show that there are thousands of people downloading them and using them on their websites. Someone who has come to WordPress on the first time is more than likely to type “free WordPress themes” into Google to find a site that gives them what they want. Unfortunately they’re more than likely to end up with spammy links, at best, on their site.

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Publishing a book with WordPress

Friday, June 4th, 2010

I’ve been blogging here with WordPress for more than a month now and I’m quite impressed – it’s a very powerful piece of software and quite easy to use. But I never thought that you could use it to publish a book – but as this article shows, you can (with some additions). But a team of people at Simon Fraser University have developed the MPub platform, which does just that.

In the span of four months in 2010, the SFU MPub team did two extraordinary things:

  1. they built a prototype of this WordPress-based book publishing system (tied in with InDesign for the print book)
  2. they published a book using the system – suitably, it was student-essays about the future of publishing: the Book of MPub

I had the pleasure of seeing John and some of his students present the results at BookCamp Toronto this past week, to a crowd of publishers, writers, designers, and technologists.

This is very cool indeed. I wonder if it could be adopted for publishing user documentation?

Posted in WordPress, books | No Comments »