blogging – Page 2 – Paul Maunders

Who reads my blog?

According to Feedburner, at the time of writing I have 44 readers subscribed to my blog’s RSS feed. I have no idea how accurate this is, so I’d like to run a little experiment.

If you are a subscriber to this site’s feed please post a comment on this post with your name. If you don’t want to leave your full name then just leave an alias, but please use a valid e-mail address so I know you are a unique reader. If you want to give me any feedback about the things I write about, then now is also your chance!

Thanks Guys!

Upgrading to WordPress 2.5 with subversion

The quickest way to upgrade wordpress is via subversion. Assuming you had already installed your blog via subversion then you can upgrade using the following steps:

Backup your database
Since the wordpress db contains only MyISAM tables, you can backup with a simple file copy.

cd /var/lib/mysql cp -Rp wordpress/ wordpressBACKUP

Switch to the latest subversion url
Just run the svn switch command. This will add, update and delete scripts as required to bring you to the latest version.

cd /path/to/your/blog svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/

Run the upgrade script
Finally, run the wordpress upgrade script, which upgrades the database and anything else it might need to do. Simply visit http://www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Upgrading WordPress with Subversion

Besides being a useful tool for software developers to keep track of their source code versions, Subversion also provides a quick and easy way for users to install/upgrade software such as blogs, wiki’s and forums that are constantly being updated with new features and security patches.

However if, like me, you initially installed WordPress manually by downloading the zip file and extracting the files, you will first need to do a little bit of work to link your software in to the subversion repository.

Assuming your wordpress installation is in a folder called blog, you can get it working with the following steps:

# backup the original blog folder cp -Rp blog blogBACKUP # create a new folder mkdir blogNEW # checkout the latest version of wordpress from their subversion repository svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.1/ blogNEW/ # copy in any custom changes in wp-content and also the wp-config.php file cp -Rp blog/wp-con* blogNEW/ # copy in the .htaccess file if you have one cp -Rp blog/.htaccess blogNEW/ # delete the original blog rm -rf blog # move the new blog to your blog locatio mv blogNEW/ blog # finally run the http://yourdomain/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php script in your web browser

Once you’re linked into a Subversion repository, future updates can be applied by simply running:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2/

Where the url given is the subversion repository location of the new version you wish to upgrade to.

NB: After every update, you should go to http://yourdomain/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your web browser as their may be some database tables that need upgrading.

Leopard + WordPress = Ultimate Blogging Tool

In the last 24 hours blogging has become a whole lot easier for me. The reason for this is that I upgraded both my laptop and my blog yesterday evening. The MacBook was taken from OS X Tiger to Leopard and my blog was switched from Blogger to WordPress . The combined Leopard/Wordpress blogging platform makes writing a blog (and embedding images such as screenshots) a breeze. In this post I will show you the steps required to take some screen grabs and then upload them to WordPress.

Take a screenshot

The two main screenshot commands you will most likely use are Command-Shift-3 which takes a grab of the entire screen, or Command-Shift-4 which allows you to select an area of the screen to capture. Both commands will save the the resulting image on your desktop.

Screenshot of Blog Homepage

Resize an image

Once you have made some screenshots you may want to resize them. Double click on the image and it will open up in the Preview utility. Click on the view menu as shown below.

On the view menu select adjust size, this will open an options window.

Screenshot of Preview Resize Options

For this post I have resized all my images to have a common width of 400 pixels. Leave the scale proportionally and resample image options checked, then click OK.

Save as JPEG

By default, the screen shot function will save your images as PNGs. Sometimes they are quite large files, so I like to save them as JPEGs instead and adjust the quality down a few notches to result in a smaller file size. Just click File > Save As to bring up the saving options.

Screenshot of Preview Save Options

Uploading to WordPress

Finally, now that the images have been prepared we can upload them to WordPress. On the Write Post page, you will see an upload as shown below.

Screenshot of WordPress Image Uploader

Simply click browse to select the image you want to upload from your desktop, then give it a title and/or description and press the upload button. Once the image has uploaded you will be given a few options on whether you want to display the full image or a thumbnail, and whether you want the image to have a link. Since I had resized my images to 400 pixels, I wanted to display the full image so I selected full size with no link. Then you just press send to editor and the appropriate image code is sent into the main editing text area.

And that’s it!

Switching from blogger to wordpress

I took the plunge tonight and converted my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I have been wanting to do this for a while; the main reason being that I find Blogger’s post editor incredibly frustrating. It refuses to automatically convert new line characters to BRs no matter which mode I use, which means I always have to go through and add them manually after each paragraph.

Anyway, the migration process was made very easy by the fact that WordPress provide some comprehensive import tools that go out and retrieve all your old blog posts and re-assemble them within wordpress.

Wordpress Blogger Import Tool

The only slight hiccup was that I had to briefly convert my Blogger account from an ftp based account to a blogspot hosted account in order for WordPress to do the import. This is a simple option in the Publishing settings on Blogger.