WordPressGarage.com

WordPress upgrade nightmare and lessons learned

I just spent five hours trying to save WordPress Garage and another site of mine, but some of the damage is irrevocable. Here’s the story of this nightmare, and what I’ve learned:

I have a site that was running on WordPress version 2.2. I hadn’t bothered to upgrade since we had stopped publishing on it in November for various reasons, but a recent link to one of the posts on that site from TechCrunch inspired me to get that site going again.

The site was running really slowly, which was another reason to try to fix it up. So the upgrade began.

Once the upgrade was finished and all plugins were reactivated, all the posts disappeared. I could see that they were there somewhere, since we have a section in the sidebar where random post titles show up, and titles were displaying there, but the home page was blank, and if I went to Manage > Posts, nothing showed up there.

So I backed up everything (or so I thought), uninstalled and reinstalled the whole site. Still no luck, plus I realized that I hadn’t backed up all of the site’s images in the Uploads folder - they were now gone for good. Horror number 1.

I hacked around for a few hours, and then I got into even more trouble: by mistake I imported the other site’s database into WordPress Garage via PHPmyAdmin (don’t ask). Horror number 2. That’s not great, I thought, but I’ll just restore the WordPress Garage database backup that I get emailed to me automatically with the WP-DB-Backup plugin. Or so I thought.

For some reason I has set the plugin to send backups only once a week, and the backup files were not being attached and were coming out as a big jumble within the body of the email. Horror number 3.

In short: I had no backup of WordPressGarage. I thought all was lost, and was planning my final post for this site telling people that the whole site was gone and I was giving up.

How I mostly got out of this ridiculous mess

Then I remembered that I had upgraded WordPressGarage recently, and like a good girl I had backed it up before upgrading. I found the backup file in my Recycle Bin, and imported it into the database. That fixed everything, but I was still missing a few posts. I found them via Google’s Cache, and re-entered them one by one.

So the only information missing here are a few comments. I apologize to the commenters - if you want to resubmit, please do.

The situation on the other site

It turns out that a plugin was causing the posts to disappear. I use the Sideblog plugin there (as I do here for the Shorties category that appears in the sidebar), and the older version that I was using for WordPress 2.2 was making the posts disappear for some reason. Once I upgraded the plugin, the posts reappeared.

As a result of this whole balagan (a very useful Hebrew word that means chaos and mess, and is one of the two Hebrew words that Lorelle knows, as she told us at WordCamp Israel), I was left with the following collateral damage: I lost all of the other site’s images, which is pretty blatant since every post there has a thumbnail image. In additional, all the tags have disappeared, and I can’t get them back. Plus I lost a few comments here on WordPress Garage.

Lessons learned

This whole experience aged me a few years, but I’d like to help you live a bit longer, so here’s some advice when it comes to messing around with WordPress upgrades and databases:

1. Don’t get complacent about upgrades. We do it so often, and most of the time it works, that we can get lazy. It’s understandable, especially for people running multiple WordPress blogs, since backing everything up every time and going through the whole process for every site can be really time consuming. But if you value the content you’ve produced, it’s worth taking the time to protect yourself against any possible mishaps.
2. If you are using the WP-DB Backup plugin, check to make sure you’re getting the backups often enough, and that they actually work.
3. Do yourself a favor and set your WordPress blog to save all images in your theme folder. You can do this by going to Options > Miscellaneous, and changing the file path to wp-content/themes/yourtheme/blogimages. That way you have everything together in one place. One of my mistakes here was that I backed up the theme files, but not the images. Or at least just remember to back up your images, wherever they are.
4. Be very very careful when messing around in PHPmyAdmin. There is no undo button or option. If you make a mistake, you have to live with it.
5. If you upgrade and then find that something is wrong, deactivate all your plugins and then reactivate them one by one to see if any of them are the cause of the problem. Also, make sure you’re running the latest versions of the plugins. If I had known this, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache.
6. Don’t do sensitive work like this in the middle of the night. You’re brain just isn’t as clear as it is in daylight. Get a good night’s sleep, and then upgrade. This could save you from making some really stupid mistakes.

Here’s to more infrequent WordPress upgrades!

Posted in News & Views | Tags: phpMyAdmin, upgrades | 7 Comments »

Park your new domain with the LaunchPad WordPress parking theme

Here’s a new and interesting WordPress theme idea: LaunchPad is a WordPress theme for people who like to buy domain names, but don’t always put a site on them right away. On many hosts, if you don’t create a site, your domain name hosts a page full of ads for them. LaunchPad was created according to the author to make it clear that “I’m not your billboard.”

LaunchPad is smart and pretty. It includes the ability for visitors to stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed and email updates.

Posted in Themes | Tags: unique | No Comments »

Find out how much your domain and site are worth with dnScoop.com

I think that dnScoop.com is more of a vanity tool than something really useful, but it’s fun anyways. According to the dnscoop.com About page, “dnScoop.com attempts to estimate a value for an established website or a domain name by using factors such as:

• Links pointing to the domain
• Popularity of the domain
• Age of the domain
• Pagerank of the domain
• Traffic to the domain
• and more…”

According to dnScoop, WordPressGarage.com is worth $12,669. Yeah right, but it’s a pretty number anyways. Here are the stats that this figure is based on:

• The domain is over 11 months old.
• The current PageRank is 4.
• Total number of inbound links is 4951. They provide a link to browse all these incoming links.
• Alexa Rank is 140,220. You can also click there to see traffic details from Alexa.
• This site is sitting on a server with 489 other sites! That is definitely eye-opening.
• A single text link ad on WPG would cost $10 a month. But we all know that text link ads are a big no-no now.

Pretty fun, no? So be a little vain and go see how much your site is worth.

Posted in News & Views | Tags: silly stuff | No Comments »

New Twitter-like WordPress theme released by Automattic: Prologue

Matt just announced the release of a new theme that will make your WordPress blog into a Twitter-like environment. The theme is called Prologue, and is available on WordPress.com and as a download under Open Source GPL. (If you click on this link, it will take you to a page where you can download each theme file one by one. It would be a little more user friendly if it was all in one zip).

Update January 31, 2008: The theme is available in one zip file download at Sizlopedia.

In case it’s not clear, Prologue does not run on the Twitter engine; it is simply a WordPress theme that uses the WordPress platform to emulate Twitter’s functionality, with a few extra WordPress blog features thrown in.

This is amazing (and is another reminder as to why I love WordPress) because:

• It is another example of the innovative brains at Automattic. Twitter has its uses, but can have many other applications with some tweaking, and currently has a few drawbacks. Automattic saw the potential, and created Prologue.
• Prologue has the following benefits that Twitter does not:
  • Privacy: It can be private so it can be used for online project management or other types of business collaboration that should not be public. As Matt says, this type of tool can be extremely useful for communication in virtual companies, and could even replace online project management tools like Basecamp.
  • Publicity: You can create your own Twitterish network on a specific topic: you love canaries and want to connect with others who share your love? Create a dedicated online site where registered users can express themselves and share information at will on caring for canaries.
  • Comments: The ability to add comments to any item means that the main conversation contains the primary information so it stays neat.
  • Multiple RSS feeds: As Matt says, “There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.”

Check out the demo here. I love the idea, and I can’t wait to try it out.

Introducing Prologue « WordPress.com

Posted in Themes | Tags: unique | 2 Comments »

WP-Cal plugin security vulnerability

A vulnerability has been discovered in the WP-Cal plugin for WordPress, an event calendar plugin by Fahlstad. This vulnerability can be exploited by malicious people to conduct SQL injection attacks.

Just last week another plugin by Fahlstad had a security issue uncovered: the WP-Forum plugin. Bad luck for Fahlstad?

WordPress WP-Cal Plugin “id” SQL Injection - Advisories - Secunia

Posted in Shorties | Tags: security | 2 Comments »

Hail all WordPress plugin creators - Reuters will pay you $5000 for a plugin

Reuters OpenCalais project is looking for a plugin developer who can create a plugin or application for WordPress that can do the following:

1. Offer automatic blog content scanning
2. Support rich meta-tagging
3. Create and maintain a Semantic tag cloud for each blogger to post
4. Embed the related Calais URI.

The price? A measly $5000. I bet that’s the most anyone’s ever offered or will be paid so far for developing a WordPress plugin.

So if you’ve got the brains and the time, this seems like it’s worth checking out. As for me - well, I believe I’m lacking in both qualities for this particular project, so I’ll have to pass.

Posted in News & Views | Tags: unique | No Comments »

How to add a tabbed interface to your WordPress blog

Headsetoptions has a great review of the types of tabbed interfaces available, and a tutorial on how to add one to your WordPress blog.

A tabbed interface is one of those boxes that you often see in the sidebar of a lot of premium themes where you click on tabs at the top, and it shows you different types of information in the same space. The main benefit of tabbed interfaces is that it helps save real estate on your blog, which can be pretty limited. Here’s an example from Solostream’s Premium WordPress Magazine Theme:

Solostream also has a tabbed interface for the feature article section in some of his other premium themes.

Basically, there are three tabbed interfaces available: DOMtab, Tabber, and Tabs. The main difference between the tabbed interfaces are ease of use, and whether you can use them for commercial purposes.

Update Jan. 26, 2007: Another tabbing method that wasn’t mentioned on Headsetoptions is Yahoo! UI Library: TabView.

Check out the full post for the whole shebang: Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme - Part 2: DOMTab, Tabber, more

Posted in Tips | Tags: navigation, sidebar | 1 Comment »

Socialize Me! WordPress Plugin helps your blog interact with leading social networks

With the proliferation of social media networks, blogs have become only one tool in creating our online identity. The question is: how do we integrate all of the facets of our online identity so that we can actually have a life too? blah blah tech’s Socialize Me WordPress plugin is another step in this direction.

The Socialize Me WordPress plugin gives you another way to interact with visitors to your site who have come via other social networks:

Imagine one of your articles has been submitted to StumbleUpon. You’re getting a steady stream of visitors to your ‘blog. You could really connect with some of these guys — if you knew who they were.

Well here’s the thing, with Socialize Me! those visitors to your ‘blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! [I'm] on StumbleUpon, too!” with a link to your profile.

With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more.

StumbleUpon is a great example of how the plugin can be used, since StumbleUpon can be a pretty good source of traffic, but the visitors are always unknown, and seem to just pass on through. This plugin can hopefully create a stronger connection with them and get them to stick around.

WordPress Plugin: Socialize Me!

Posted in Plugins | Tags: facebook, social, StumbleUpon | 1 Comment »

WordPress WP-Forum plugin security vulnerability

Heads up to any users of the WP-Forum WordPress plugin: Secunia has reported that it can be exploited by malicious people to conduct SQL injection attacks. Too bad - just when I was looking for a simple forum solution for a WordPress blog.

Posted in Shorties | Tags: security | 1 Comment »

Consumer evangelists vs. lawyers: using “WordPress” in domain names

Michael over at WPCandy brought up the question recently of whether it’s ok to use the word “WordPress” in the domain name of sites about WordPress that are not affiliated with Automattic. I came across this issue about a month ago thanks to Lorelle, who actually mentions this repeatedly in her WordPress Wednesday posts on the Blog Herald. Lorelle states that you need to get permission to use the word WordPress in your blog’s name and domain, so I immediately contacted someone over at Automattic to see what they had to say on the matter. He pointed me to this page: http://wordpress.org/about/domains/.

Of course, if I had known about this policy before I started WordPress Garage, I would never have used the current domain name. But here we are, almost a year later, and the question remains: do I need to change my domain name? And do all blogs that use the word WordPress in their names need to change that too?

I think there are two issues at hand here:

1. Trademark dilution
2. Consumer evangelism

Trademark Dilution, i.e. “I WordPressed so much today on my WordPress”

Based on my modest understanding of trademarks (I worked a bit in the field), the reason Automattic doesn’t want anyone using WordPress in their domain name is because they (or their lawyers) are concerned about “trademark dilution.” Trademark dilution is when a brand name becomes so tied to the product that it becomes the general name of the product, and even a verb. Some good examples of this are the use of the word “Xerox” instead of “photocopy,” “Kleenex” instead of “tissue,” and “Saran Wrap” instead of “plastic wrap.” While this may seem like great success since the brand name became so widely known that people just call the product by the brand name, it is problematic for companies because it makes it more difficult for them to protect their trademarks against infringements.

So, in the case of WordPress, their trademark would become diluted if people started to call blogs “WordPresses,” or would use the word “WordPress” as a verb, i.e. “I have to take a break from WordPressing while I go on vacation.”

I’m no intellectual property expert, but this seems unlikely to happen. Blogs will be blogs.

Consumer Evangelism, i.e. “I love WordPress so much that I’m actually going to write hordes of posts about it and create themes and plugins - all for free”

Which company is the king of consumer evangelism? I’ll give you a hint: their name rhymes with Snapple. Yes, Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple have succeeded in creating products that people LOVE. Their customers love their products so much that they talk about them, write about them, tell their friends to buy them, etc. They have armies of consumer evangelists all over the globe hugging their iPods, and coveting the iPhone (the iPhone still hasn’t come to many countries).

Now, Apple is a pretty big company, so you’d think their lawyers would be freaking out over trademark dilution issues. Well, here are a few examples of blogs and sites that are not affiliated with Apple that write about Apple products and use the word Apple or iPhone in their domain and blog name:

The Apple Blog

Apple iPhone

Apple Fun

Apple Are

Apple iPhone Blog

Apple Matters

I don’t know if Apple encourages this, but as far as I know they aren’t publicizing any policies related to the use of their trademarks in domain and blog names. Maybe they understand that this type of marketing is gold - people who aren’t on the company payroll, and are therefore “objective,” who are willing to dedicate time and money to promoting their products for them. Now THAT is a marketers dream!

Let’s do a quick comparison with the overweight, slightly-balding company to see how they’re managing with consumer evangelists. Here are the Microsoft fan sites that I found:

http://scoble.weblogs.com/ - doesn’t use Microsoft in the domain, but is now dead.

Microsoft’s not exactly about to go under, but I would say that Apple’s position is pretty envious.

Back to WordPress

WordPress has consumer evangelists (me!). Dozens of bloggers are posting about WordPress every day in order to share their knowledge with the WordPress community. And thousands of readers read these blogs every day to quench their thirst for more knowledge about the WordPress platform. In my opinion, this is all part of the Open Source spirit, where people learn from the community, and then want to give back to the community in whatever way they can.

Here are some examples of blogs totally or almost totally dedicated to WordPress (I apologize if I’ve left you out - feel free to leave URLs in the comments):

WPCandy

Hack WordPress

Darren Hoyt

Weblog Tools Collection

Solostream

Lorelle on WordPress

Check out WP Themes Gallery’s list of the top 40 WordPress blogs to get an idea of how many there are out there.

Now let’s take a look at what I would say is a major WordPress competitor: Movable Type. I did a quick search, and while I found a lot of individual posts about using Movable Type, I didn’t find many blogs dedicated to the topic. I actually only found one, and while it is really good, it is written by Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type.

So who’s in better shape: the company with the dozens of bloggers who blog about them daily but use their trademark in their domain and blog name; or the company that doesn’t have anyone blogging about them and also don’t have anyone using their trademark anywhere?

The lawyers say company #2. The figures say company #1.

Conclusion

In my very humble and not-worth-much opinion, WordPress should be careful about taking action that may appear as an attack on their community. Their domain policy is understandable, but it may cause more harm than good. They should remember that a consumer evangelist is worth a lot more than the best marketing or ad campaign.

A good compromise could be for bloggers to add a disclaimer on their site that says that they are not affiliated with WordPress or Automattic. WordPress Training’s About page has a really good example which says the following:

WordPressTraining.com is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc. or the WordPress ® Open Source project.

WordPress ® is a trademark of Automattic, Inc.

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that.

Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic | 22 Comments »