Category — Project: blogs

We are working on re-arranging our blog portfolio; a blog at ncwyt.wordpress.com called “NCWYT” or No one Cares What You Think, will become the on-line comment site for any sort of blathering to my people.  This blog (blogJOG)  will be re-done, design-and-layout-wise, and will provide updates on my projects.

We will be catching up on our blog for the Smithfield Plantation and working on a web site using the Wordpress blog software for the annual Kiwanis Club auction.

We are working slowly at tweaking the blogJOG but have also decided on a radical change in direction for developing the GregMaine.Com home page. The blogJOG is “powered” by the open-source on-line publishing software known as Wordpress and we are slowly changing, enhancing, adjusting the pre-formated “delivered” theme (an open-source product from wpdesigner.com, see link in this page’s footer). This development work is satisfying the primary goals of these projects: (1) provide the GregMaine.Com IT dept. with experience and understanding of web-based technologies and the WordPress package, in particular, in preparation for supporting the coming credit union’s deployment of a modern web presence (as compared to the simple existence of today); (2) provide a web presence in support of the current and future communication and revenue needs; (3) provide a reason for the IT department to have their own laptop; and (4) provide the IT department, and blogGrok, specifically, with something to do in his chair while “American Idiots” is on.

So, consistent with these ways and means, we have decided to discontinue the use of the conventional web page design and development approach for the GregMaine.com home page (use of a simple web-page builder software and tweaking from there) and leverage our growing comfort-level with WordPress and use it to deploy the GregMaine.com home page as well.

So, in the next few weeks while we are waiting for our income tax refunds and the Economic Stimulus package: “lets-give-everybody-money-and-maybe-they-wont-complain-or-notice-we-are-running the-economic-future-of-the-country-into-the-ground” funds, we will offer you a new web site for GregMaine.com.

We have spent a considerable amount of time today in upgrading our WordPress v2.3 platform to the latest stable release: v2.5. This was not an insignificant task.

In this process, we accomplished backing up the mySQL database (containing the user contributed info. such as posts and comments) on the host server (downloading a copy of it to our remote PC) for the first time; using the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) utility to download our blog design file infrastructure for backup purposes to the remote; downloaded the full upgrade file infrastructure from the WordPress site to the remote; carefully copying and deleting the appropriate files between the old and new versions, and finally uploading via FTP support all the upgraded files to the host server.

Then, via web browser, executing an upgrade command that magically updated the mySQL database and launched the blog using the new upgrade files; thus, we are here and we have had a few issues.

We have noticed that some customizations have been lost (a couple of color changes and links are missing) and we had some error messages when uploading images. A review of the help forum at WordPress found a reference to some extra commas in a couple of files that should be deleted; once these commas were deleted, the code now appears to work.