Fantastiblog

The amazing Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin has just been updated to enable upgrading your Wordpress installation from 2.7 to 2.7.1

This plugin really makes it easy to upgrade Wordpress, even from an old install way back at version 1.5! The author had finished development when Wordpress announced the native ability to upgrade, however this gives us hope it may work for a while yet. Great news for those who find the native update doesn’t work for them.

The renovations continue up at the main site. The latest page to get the makeover is my money maker : now titled ‘Improve Your Income.’ By small, realistic amounts is the sub-text here! Sure you could make a lot of money, but that would be the exception rather than the rule. After all, I’m still here working day-to-day and not relaxing in a tropical paradise somewhere - your mileage may vary, of course.

Well it is a start, and I’ve been using some of those sites and techniques for many years now - earning some small cash along the way. You can earn some for yourself, so take a look and perhaps join in today! There’s nothing to lose but a couple of minutes and it could be the start of something big - way down the line.

The AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin » Acme Technologies Zeitgeist is a plugin to manage placing adsense blocks into individual posts!

Nice job.

Technorati is a site that aims to index the live web, or all the fast updating content like blogs, photos, videos and so on. If you want to have some say over how your blog is presented, you can ‘claim’ it there.

When you do, they will ask you to create a post with the following link in it : Technorati Profile

Now that I have done so, Technorati will come back and spider this site. Then I’ll be in!

Check out these neat tools at http://js-kit.com/.

Simply by adding two lines to your website you can add a poll, comments or even a ratings system. The basic tools are free to use (at the moment), with adds potentially being added into the items down the track.

When you are running your own Wordpress blog on H-Sphere you will eventually want to install a new theme. What makes this interesting is that WebShell, the tool allowing file access to your H-Sphere hosting account, doesn’t appear to allow you to upload a directory (folder) from your computer. Since a Wordpress theme can contain many files (and even a few folders) this presents a sticky situation. Do you want to upload all those files 10 at a time? No? I don’t either.

What we need is a little lateral thinking. Now, if you have a static IP address you could turn on FTP and upload that way, but what if that’s not an option either? As fortune would have it, WebShell allows us to use a wonderful tool called ‘wget’, which is more or less short for ‘web get’ - a very tricky name indeed. What could it mean? Simply it allows us to grab any file that you can click to in a web browser and copy it into your WebShell. Now do you see where we are going?

The best way to get the theme in is to first navigate to your blog/wp-contents/themes directory in WebShell. Next, try to find the original URL of your theme on the web (this will usually be a .zip archive, which is great for this job.) Now use the ‘WGET’ button that you see at the bottom of the WebShell page. Just paste in the URL of the theme’s archive, click ‘get’ and wait. Once your theme has been transferred to your WebShell, click on it once and then use the ‘uncompress’ button to, well, uncompress the archive. Now your theme will be ready to use.

What if you cannot find a nice link to the archive?

Sometimes the download link is obscured behind a link like this :
http://themes.wordpress.net/download.php?theme=2575
and WebShell will only get you a file like ‘download.php’ - which isn’t very helpful.

Fear not! This is where your ISP’s free web hosting space comes in handy. Remember that? Most ISP’s do provide you with free web space on their site, usually something like : ‘members.ispname.com/yourname’ go and check now, you probably do have it available.

Now that you have your free web space ready, upload the archive there and go back to the previous step. This time, however, replace the original URL of the theme archive with the URL to the archive in your account at your ISP. Easy.

Loving this new theme! This is iLeather, one of the wonderful themes available from Blogger Lounge. The question you may be asking is : “Why orange?”

Why not?

Okay, that’s not the best of answers. The whole Fantastic web site has been online for a very long time now, and in the early days the design was based around a little orange background graphic. For some reason I’m still feeling fond of the old colour, so in keeping with that (not so carefully chosen) theme I’m sticking with orange. For now, at least.

Enjoy!

We will be upgrading the Hsphere system packages on all Linux servers on Tomorrow, March 13, 2007 at 2:30 AM EDT (Tue 13th Mar, 5:30pm Sydney time.)

Control panel will be stopped for 2 hours or less during the process. Web services can see a downtime of 5 minutes/per server and mail-services can see a downtime of upto 10 mins/per server.

While being mostly a set of security and bug fixes, it also upgrades PHP to 4.4.6 and Postgresql to 7.4.16. We couldn’t give a 24 hour notice this time as there is a major security issue that needs to be immediately patched.

Lookout - there was a security exploit injected into WP 2.1.1 in the last few days. The WordPress team are right on it and have a 2.1.2 upgrade ready to go, which I’ve just installed here now.

Great to see them on top of things and it got me motivated to install a plugin to check the version of WordPress … I’ll also sign up for the upgrade mailing list

I am trialling a very easy to install stats plugin for WordPress called PopStats. Yes, the site is in Spanish - don’t let that stop you … the plugin installs just by uploading to your plugins folder on the webserver and can be easily modified to run in English.

Perhaps when there are stats to see I will show some of them off. That’s right, not only do you get stats on your Dashboard, you can place them on your blog.

Fine, I’ll try to drop todays visits in here :

[nope, not working ... I'll have to dig a little first]