I have a number of sites hosted on the (gs), including WordPress and MediaWiki sites with MySQL databases, some of them are mine and some below to third parties. 

(dv) comes with a Plesk front-end management tool, which is ok, but the first thing I did was enable ssh access as I prefer the extra flexibility that hands-on environment gives you. Though I did spend the afternoon familiarizing myself with the Plesk environment and I like it well enough.

There are a few caveats when moving WordPress to a new site. I also changed the domains, and that added some extra complexity. I moved:

• http://blog.exerro.com/ to http://exerro.com/
• http://blog.http://nickt.com/ to http://nickt.com/
• http://blog.nickt.com/ to http://nickt.com/
• and some other, minor, changes

I got rid of the leading hostnames mainly to simplify my environment and it also aids SEO. 

These are some of the things you should watch for:

• The backup and restore of the database didn’t work well and I didn’t have much confidence in it. (mt) have a KnowledgeBase article on the subject. I used the command line to backup the databases like this:
  • $ mysqldump --add-drop-table -u Username -p dbname > dbname.sql
• And restored them like this:
  • $ mysql -u Username -p dbname < dbname.sql
• As I’ve moved domains, the databases needed some work to fix links. I found an article that was of help, but what you basically do is
  • update the wp_options table with:
    • UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://OLDURL', 'http://NEWURL') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';
  • update the references to absolute URLs:
    • UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://OLDURL','http://NEWURL');
  • update the posts that reference other posts on the site:
    • UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://OLDURL', 'http://NEWURL');
• As I changed domain names, the permalinks broke. Make the .htaccess file writeable and in wp-admin/settings/permalinks hit “save changes” to regenerate the permalinks. If you have a problem here, it’ll probably be down to the .htaccess file either not existing or not being writable. 
• WordPress on (dv) requires the permissions on the wp-content/uploads directory to be 777, or you have problems adding to your media library. There may be a better way of doing this, but after spending a couple of hours I decided it was good enough. You also have to either edit the wp_options table in the database or simply change the settings/misc uploads setting in WordPress admin to be “wp-content/uploads” (note there’s no leading “/”). There are a lot of threads on the (mt) forums discussing this, this is the most relevant one. The WordPress forums also discuss this problem. 
• Also to allow successful uploads to your media library, PHP safe-mode has to be “off” as the httpd server and filesystem permissions are different. The easiest way to change this setting is via the Plesk control panel, but you can also edit /etc/php.ini. 
• I had some non-WordPress files, mostly images, on the old sites, so I used .htaccess to redirect to the new locations, specifically for links to files and images I’ve been posting to forums for years, and didn’t want them to break. For example, http://nickt.com/landrovers redirects to http://exerro.com/oldsites/2009/http://nickt.com/landrovers/.
• I use the WordPress Database Backup plugin, and it needed a new backup directory to be created in wp-content and made writable. 
• I noticed that the WordPress Automatic Upgrade and the automatic plugin upgrades now require an ftp username and password. 
• I setup MediaWiki to use short URLs, like Wikipedia, (aka removing “index.php” from the URL) in line with best practices for forming URLs using this method. 
• Also for the “codex exerro“, I only allowed authorized users to read pages using this method. 
• I temporarily disabled account creation by adding “$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;” to  LocalSettings.php

I’m still wondering whether or not to use Drupal instead of MediaWiki for both the “codex exerro” and a private wiki I’m building. Drupal has more flexibility in terms of user rights management (or is at least simpler than MediaWiki) and managing content (unsurprisingly as it is a Content Management System), but doesn’t look as good out of the box and is more complex to setup and maintain.

Anyway, it took around a day to migrate half a dozen sites and databases. I’m looking forward to pushing (dv) to see what it’s got!

I recently spent some time in the The Maze District of Canyonlands National Park. Here’s the slideshow from that trip.
I used animoto to put together a video slideshow, with music (700x389px):

A Trip to The Maze from Nick Taylor on Vimeo

I use flickr to host my images, so it makes sense to use their flash-based slideshow, if for nothing else other than ease of use (700x525px).

Finally, here’s a static image embedded from flickr, resized to 700x466px (a good size for landscape oriented shots, remember to embed the large via the flickr photo album plugin and resize down in the HTML).

Hopefully this looks ok and I’ll use these defaults in the future. Of course, over at blog.exerro.com, the defaults are 950px wide, and slideshow photos should be 425px high. I’d love a way to do this without using Flash, any suggestions?

See it in action for yourself over at blog.exerro.com!

As you can see, it’s a little bland, but perfect for text-heavy sites. Also, on the front/index page, there were problems with embedded elements and graphics spilling-over into the next column – it looked ugly. 

Lately, I’ve been wanting to add more, larger photos in-line in blog posts and I’m embedding more video.

So I hunted around for a new theme. I liked the prophoto themes, but thought they were expensive. Graphpaper Press has some wonderful themes, and in fact I may use one of theme over at our travel blog, but they are also a paid-for commercial product (they are however, exactly what I’m looking for when we travel).

I was happy when I found Derek Punsalan’s site over at 5thirtyone.com. He has a couple of free themes, including the highly visual unstandard theme, and the one I settled on, grid-focus. 

Grid-focus enables me to have large graphics and embeds in the post, up to 700px across (I edited the .css file to get more width here at the expense of deleting the third column). This shows off graphics well and eliminates the the problem of overlap between posts. 

I think it looks great, don’t you?

It looks like just the app I’ve been needing for our live-travels blog over at exerro.

Here’s a picture of one of my trucks by way of a test.

I’m going to have to remember that the pictures cannot be more than 400px wide given the two column layout in my current template. In MarsEdit, I’ll have to use the “small” size for images.

• blog.exerro.com – a blog that I’ll use when we’re traveling
• blog.nickt.com – a blog for the consulting side of life
• blog.http://nickt.com – this blog, which is a place for everything else

I’ve kept a similar look and feel across all 3, I host them all on Media Temple, which offers a great virtualized service. I’m running WordPress 2.5 with a mysql backend.

I’ve always liked Kyle Neath’s hemingway theme, but I noticed it didn’t support WordPress Widgets. It’s possible to hack the template a little to get this working, then I discovered that the NinjaMonkeys had already done this. It saved me a lot of time. Checkout Ninja Monkeys! Theme – Widgetized Hemingway for WordPress 2.2+.

I also added a few plugins:

• akismet – to cut down on comment spam
• uberdose all in one SEO pack
• flickr photo gallery – this is the nicest of the flickr plugins
• google XML sitemaps generator
• WP-OpenID – again, to cut down on comment spam
• Twitter Tools – to enable tweets on my sidebar, courtesy of Denver-based dev Alex King

As we’re off traveling again soon (follow our progress on blog.exerro.com), I’ve also started using Marsedit, to allow us both to blog offline and upload text and images whenever we can connect to a ropey internet connection!