Not everything is as smooth as butter

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I had a couple of freak out moments with the use of WordPress. I haven’t been able to discover what caused one of them and I’m a bit annoyed at the other (even though bugs happen and you have to deal.)

The first one was related to the database: all of a sudden, I ceased to be able to authenticate with phpMyAdmin, which I needed for making a backup. You see, when I started out, I grabbed just any old database for what I thought was going to be just a learning dry run. It turned out that I got too excited and developed the whole site using this old database. What happened next is that I had to move all that data to a production database. In all honesty, I don’t know who to blame for the problem: WordPress, phpMyAdmin, or yet some server set up. The fact is that I could authenticate successfully using mysql from the command line, but not through phpMyAdmin. I gave up on this for a while and move on with things only to discover two days later that things were working normally again. Hmmm…

The other issue had to do with permalinks. I changed the setting in the WordPress menu so that the site would use permalinks with full dates (including numerical day of the months). I use the awesome Atahualpa theme version 3.4.3, which I think was majorly unhappy with my spanking new WordPress 3.0.1. What happened next was befuddlement, as my entire site stopped loading giving me 403/404 errors. I went around checking folder permissions, poking around the web for help in discussion forums (ok, I know the correct plural is ‘fora’, don’t be a snob), but no dice. Gave up on everything after one hour of feeling stupid and watched a movie (Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, which I didn’t think was his best). Came back and opened the browser only to find the site up again! (Well, I guess it’s time to update my Atahualpa theme to a version that overcomes these incompatibilities with WP 3.0.1.)

Although I was happy to be in business again, I had to tweak a few things in my site. When the new permalink syntax took effect, I ended up with URL name clashes, which WordPress kindly ‘solved’ by appending integers to the conflicting file names (actually, directories in my site.)

And, I have yet to complete my swap of databases for this site, but I expect there will be data *in there* to update, so I’m getting instructed on the dangers before taking the leap.

I’m digging WordPress

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This is the first site I’ve made with WordPress. In the past, I used straight HTML, HTML with CSS, Seamonkey (and its previous incarnations), iWeb, a little of Dreamweaver, and Ingeniux. All had their annoyances, some positives, but mostly, shortcomings.

My main gripe is that I don’t want to spend lots of time on crafting webpages (even though I love a spiffy page!) and also that I have low tolerance for buggy behavior. Since gold ol’ Bryan Ward pointed out WordPress to me, about three days ago, I’ve been impressed with WordPress as it solves my problems easily. I can use great looking themes, but I can also hack them if I need it and throw in custom code. Best of both worlds. And best of all, I can update my pages from a standard browser, even from my iPad sitting in an airport, if I must.

I took a quick look at Drupal and Joomla, but then system requirements for WordPress seemed to be less stringent. I gave it a try and in a few minutes, I was cooking up a nice site. This is definitely the way to go for me.

My next task is to hack my theme so that my pages cannot be viewed at all with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Yes, I want to make exactly that kind of statement.