wordpress 2.5 and Typepad

So I finally upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1 (from 2.3). I was somewhat nervous thanks to some commentary by their biggest competitor (Typepad by SixApart). I can’t seem to find the link anymore. Mind you the follow up articles from people involved in creating Wordpress with long lists of things to do in order to upgrade didnt help either! It definitely made me wait for a while longer than usual.

So how was it?

The upgrade was no different to previous Wordpress upgrades. It was a simple process. Click a button to deactivate all plugins, upload some files, type in a URL and then reactivate plugins. (of course taking a backup beforehand!).

I worried about my plugins, and only my books plugin isn’t working. Irritatingly the author has a beta which might fix the issue but it requires a version of PHP I don’t have. No big deal. The books archive is there mostly for my own use.

Back to the installation, it is possible Typepad has an easier installation from scratch, I have not used it so I cannot comment. Wordpress has been very flexible and always met my needs so for now Typepad doesn’t get a glance. I cannot see anything that would make me consider switching right now. Without that, Wordpress would have to screw up big time to make me move as switching platforms is a huge barrier (it strikes me as being harder than an upgrade) and a quick search on google for “moving from wordpress to typepad” showed only one result with no method around it, the rest were all moving the other way! Even the Typepad site talks about Wordpress categories and does not mention Wordpress tags). That also implies to me that right now Typepad are not targeting Wordpress users.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Everyone raves about akismet - the spam system used by wordpress (which powers this blog). It is great at stopping comment spam but cleaning up what is caught is just a pain. There needs to be some scoring system or a way of filtering the list so I can skim through it more easily. Spam Karma colour codes spam caught so you can visually see which items are possibly false positives.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Another day, another upgrade to Wordpress which breaks my password protected pages with 404 errors I spent months trying to fix before and stupidly did not make a note of the link when I fixed it back in August.

Thankfully others have now found better solutions which should stop Wordpress breaking on future upgrades. All you need to do is add the following to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 401 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html
ErrorDocument 403 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html

(noting that the path and file name need to be accuarate and working.. )

solution was found rather ironically on a competing blog publishing tool’s website: http://textpattern.com/faq/173/password-protected-directories-with-htaccess

Popularity: 13% [?]

ok so where did I go? well as you can probably see my post count started dropping right the way back in March when I got my Xbox 360 though as ever the game functionality hasnt managed to hold my attention very long - I haven’t actually played it more than a few times in the last few months - though I have used the video and audio streaming functionality a fair bit. It would be nice to have an itunes style interface inside xbox live.. maybe with zune coming out thats what will happen?

So if I have not been playing with the 360 for the last 2 months what ha been happening? Well major disenchantment with the whole web 2.0 thing (which managed to resurrect itself briefly phoneix-like from the ashes in my last post only to collapse further into the depths immediately after) and then even greater disenchantment with Wordpress.

For the last month or so I moved back to my old livejournal blog to blog about personal stuff that has been happening mainly cuz I needed somewhere to blog and the various permission levels inside Live Journal are a dream to use. Wordpress on the other hand involves me hacking core files or using a couple of plugins that give me no confidence that over time the posts will stay private to the relevant groups!

On top of that I have been having so many niggling issues with Wordpress since I upgraded from 1.5.2 that i knew I’d have to rebuild it and so I stopped using it till that was done. In the end the issues were all around the permalink system and my provider Kualo, which could only be solved by increasing the size of my “permalink file” from a few hundred bytes to 7k in size thankfully Wordpress generated that for me

So I’m back though I am going to continue using Live Journal for my personal posts going forward - if you want access.. request it from the contact Riaz page…

Popularity: 14% [?]