Views, News and Cheers!
Last weekend, facebook started offering direct profile URL and there is a mad rush to get these URLs. In a wink (actually dueing my lunch) I lost opportunity to grab the direct URL for my daughter’s profile. Got one for me though!
Moved this site to a new hosting provider overnight. Have been evaluating various options for a while, but didn’t get enough time to act on that. Last weekend, I chose the hosting provider and did a staging site on that with another domain I own.
The biggest challenge is moving the blog. I wanted to go with a wordpress upgrade as part of the move. So I had to really test the blog’s data migraiton and upgrade. I played a bit with the MySQL tables and trimmed the database. My older version of akismet was not good enough to clean up the spam from wordpress interfaces, so I had to manually do some SQL queries to get rid of the spam messages. About 2000 of them. The newer version of akismet on this site is very current and better usable.
Let me first go through the staging site setup. I installed a fresh blog with the desired version of wordpress. I made it a point that the MySQL table names are same (the database name is different though.) Then I slightly modified the SQL queries and ensured that all the legacy data is copied over to the new tables. Once the tables are populated, it required a fresh run of the upgrade script from wordpress to make the blog sync with the old data. To make sure that the staging site doesn’t mess up with the original blog, I had to change some parameters in the MySQL tables (like the blog home and base URL etc.) I also did a manual edit of the UTF-8 blog content. The old version of my blod didn’t support SQL export in UTF-8.
Setting up the staging site is very easy because the name servers for the staging site are setup well in advance and the A records are populated well before the staging site setup. Migrating the production blog is not that easy.
For migrating the production blog, I started with creating a new blog installation on the new server. The database from the older server is migrated, but the post migration upgrade phase had some issues because the DNS is still resolving to the old server. So I fired up a virtual machine which had a local resolution of the website names to the new server. From there, I completed the setup part of it.
As part of the migration, I also upgraded my themes and switched to Mandigo. Next weekend, I can spend some time on customizing it.
Why should I migrate to a new switching provider? The answer is long enough for a separate blog post.
This week, I checked out ibibo, a social networking site targeted primarily towards India’s netizens. At first, I thought that this is similar to facebook, but later found some key differences.
I haven’t explored ibibo much (yet), but there are already a few positive things I can tell, when compared to other community/networking sites.
Overall, this is a site worth exploring, especially if you are in India or know the Indian scenarios.
What is the best thing to do on a slow Sunday evening? Upgrade the blog theme.
My previous attempt to upgrade to MistyLook 3.5 wasn’t successful because I couldn’t troubleshoot some image display issues. This afternoon, I spent a few minutes on that issue and finally resolved it. Spent some time to bring the blog to a reasonable state (had to edit, scale and crop a few images.) The theme is not yet fully customized, but can live like that for a week or two.
Checkout Glogster. It is interesting. Here is my first glog that is flat, bland and as tasteless as an inevitable “hello world” program in any programming language :-).
Flipping pages of an old book I have, “Great Web Typography” during my morning break. A 15 minute flip thru the contents and some interesting pages suggests that the book will be of great help for people who provide their content thru web pages.
However, I am also thinking in the back of my mind: Is this very relavant for end users who now provide their content thru blogs? The reasons I think of are:
However, this book is a good read for even people who write blogs. It helps customize their themes and other aspects of their blogs.
What do you think?
Last week, some of my readers complained that they couldn’t see my blog entries in full. Some entries are truncated right after the entry title. So I started debugging the issue. I booted up Windows Vista and started Firefox 2, Safari and IE7. The first two browsers showed every entry fine, but IE7 has problems rendering some of the posts. My first suspicion was the embedded links to google albums, because it is lot of HTML code. I made a couple of quick webpages to check the same and found that google albums are not the root cause. Then I started looking at the HTML tags of the blog entries that are not rendering well. I found that those entries contained some meta tags that are pasted while transferring content from OpenOffice text to by blog editor. These metatags are interpreted fine by both Firefox (both and Solaris and Windows) and Safari, but IE seems to give up (not just the post, but rest of the page and other columns of the blog page.)
Once I know the root cause, I could easily strip off the meta tags from a handful of entries and tested the rendering on all the three browsers.
Life is back to normal on blogosphere!