I forgot to check the amount of webspace available for a multi-user blog before upgrading it and the thing has crashed.  I had to backtrack to find out what I did when a similar incident happened earlier in the year.  And then I remembered.  I had to get it restored to a former backed up version by my IT guy and then add webspace and then upgrade the thing.  Forgot, forgot, forgot!

So hoping he can fix it for me soon so I can increase the space and then re-run the upgrade.  Doh!

On a forum I belong to we were discussing the benefits of self-hosted vs free-hosted blogs, in this case with WordPress. One of the members was worried she might lose the increased readership she’s been getting over the past few months if she made a move now. And the reason why a move was being discussed was because another member had highlighted that free-hosted version of WordPress doesn’t take kindly to paid advertising and links being on their free supported sites. They are supposed to be non-commercial.  So, the information below gives an outline of the benefits of shifting to paid hosting for WordPress blogs.

If your traffic is increasing then it’s all the more important that you have your site where you have control.  There are things you need to think about:

• On a free hosted site there are restrictions on what you can do and limited templates.
• On a free hosted site – who is backing up your blog?
• What happens if your blog disappears?
• Do you have that content backed up?
• I have heard of people on Blogger.com whose blogs disappeared and some of them were not recovered. I haven’t heard of that at WordPress but I don’t hang around the forums there.  Don’t want to scare you but I do want you to think about this and explore the options available to you. If there is a backup system there, then that won’t be something to worry about.

The reasons why I like to have control on a paid hosting site:

• I can use whatever templates I wish – I just have to research to find them and then upload them, and activate them.
• I can install any plugins I want to use.
• I can make any modifications I wish, including background colours, text, etc.
• I can place advertisements on my blogs without worrying about whether I’m allowed to or not.
• I use a domain name of my choosing without wordpress or blogspot in the address.  Domains that relate to your keywords help a great deal.
• I have a regular backup operating so backups are emailed to me weekly (there’s a plugin for this).

You can divert your free hosted blog to your self-hosted blog – I have done this with blogger. The reasons I do this are:

• So someone cannot take over my old address and use it for their spammy efforts
• So that existing audiences can still find me and update their address list
• So that audiences at the free site can still find me when surfing through blogs.

I first decided to do this with my VA blog about 3 or more years ago – it was a scary thing to do but I did it and am really glad because that blog now carries my main domain address and my audience has grown and my PR (Google page rank) as well.  I discovered that someone took over my old blogger address because I didn’t think about it in those days and they were selling stuff that had nothing to do with being a VA – lesson learnt.  These days when I test blogs on Blogger and then shift them, I make sure I add a message on the top post of the new address and there is a redirect code you can put in html which takes people to the new site in a few seconds. I haven’t tried that with WordPress free site but even if you can’t put the redirect code you could certainly leave a message to say you’ve shifted to a new home address.  And the import feature in WordPress does work quite well to shift old posts if you wish to do that.

I hope that the above information will also help you in your decision making if you have been considering a similar move – whether it be from Blogger or WordPress free hosted sites.

Are you getting one of these messages?  One of my clients was too with her WordPress blog and nothing I did seemed to help the problem. Did lots of research, asked questions at forums and tried to restore her database once again – she’d already had it done previously.  Checked that the index.php file was in place.

We decided to set up a new webspace with a new domain elsewhere and download all the files via FTP and then upload them to the new webspace.  I was about 1/2 way through the upload when I discovered something.  The webspace I’d set up for her was almost full and I had heaps of files to go.

So I went back to her other webhost and had to do a search in her Account Management system to locate the information relating to her webhosting. Gotta love these hosts that don’t use cpanel for ease of use!  Anyway, I discovered that she had 296mb of files in what was supposed to be a 150mb allotment.  I think I found the problem!

I immediately filled out a support request to her host to find out if in fact I was correct and could they do a temporary disk space increase so we could do a full backup and run a database export.  I emailed my client and told her what I believed I’d found. She’d been told by her host that she’d been hacked and she better upgrade her WordPress.

When I thought about it I remembered an incident a year or two earlier where a small website I was working on (25mbs) gave the same error message when I was trying to switch to a new template I’d uploaded and it took me awhile to figure out why that was.  I should have remembered.

So, if you are experiencing that same error message – before anything else – check your webspace allotment.  If it’s full, get it increased and then rerun whatever it is you’re doing.

Please let me know if this post has helped you as I did a search extensively looking for help on this issue and did not come across the possiblity of the webspace being full – hopefully I can save you the hours I put in to eventually find this out!

500 Internal Error, full webspace, server error, webpage won’t view

I always upgrade my blogs with some amount of trepidation – should I or shouldn’t I?  Some blogs have upgraded fine but others have been a nightmare. Mainly because the templates I choose are not always compatible with the latest version.

So in a moment of craziness I decided to upgrade my Workplace-Ministry blog to a later version of WordPress and was instantly faced with a blank white screen after it told me I could view my blog.  Huh?  My mind started racing to see what I could do and I started to type up a help message to my IT guy.  But then I thought perhaps I should see if I could try and fix it myself.  Fortunately I had not closed the window that I’d performed the upgrade in and had opened a new browser window (I love how Firefox uses Tabs!) to view the blog.

I checked my cpanel and noticed the amount of free space was very low.  I then went into the disk space usage area and clicked on the WordPress section and it showed 0 megs.  mmm, perhaps that’s a clue.

I went back to the window where I’d performed the upgrade and wondered if I backed up through the previous views on that window and redid the upgrade whether that would make a difference?  So I did and with a quick prayer and a re-press of the Upgrade button it performed what it did only a few minutes ago.  I went back to the blank screen window and refreshed and there was my blog in front of me.  Whew!

What is the lesson in this? Well, apart from not panicking, it was not to close a window I’d been working in.  If I had I would not have been able to re-use the upgrade button because it would have considered the job had been done.  Thankfully I could go back to the beginning and redo it and it worked.  Well, another lesson learned for the day – and gratefully so!

It happened! The unimaginable!  I’d been creating new blogs in WordPress 2.6 and slowly getting used to the new look and Dashboard changes and thought I would upgrade some of my blogs to this new version. I did a couple and they worked well so I decided to upgrade this one too.  That’s when it happened.  My categories went missing!  And I didn’t know how to get them back again.

They weren’t showing in the menu sidebar – just an empty spot and when I logged into the Dashboard and viewed the Categories list, there were rows of empty tickboxes with no names and a number at the end of each line indicating the number of posts for that invisible category listing.

Searches at WordPress Support didn’t come up with any answers for me, although many were asking for help on the same thing, but Googling did produce some results with some step-by-steps on how to fix the problem.  But there were steps missing!  The first part was relatively easy and I was able to successfully make changes inside phpMyAdmin and get the categories list showing but there was no explanation on how to link the tables back up (perhaps that knowledge was assumed by the writers) and since I’ve never done it before I was not going to attempt something with no clear instructions on what to do next.

They also assumed that you had a backup file you could use to find out what all your categories were – wrong!  Mine isn’t writeable to the directory so I have xml files I have exported and can import but don’t have a back up file to refer to.  I must fix that issue one day too!

However, I discovered a really easy way of doing it in WordPress, and thought I’d share it here for those who are not game to fiddle with the database on their server.

I did a manual fix.

1. After thinking about this a great deal I decided to create a new category to see what would happen.  It showed – that was good.
2. So I placed one of my posts with that and that worked.
3. Then I ticked all the other blank categories listed and clicked on the delete button. Everything automatically defaulted to ‘uncategorised’ which was still showing as blank (and is not removeable) but I knew that the first listing there was the uncategorised list.
4. After that I recreated my categories and reconnected everything – there were 118 posts so that wasn’t too bad and only took me 2-3 hours to do.

The good thing about this was I got to rethink all the categories I have listed here and reconnected some posts to belong to more than one category so in effect, my blog got tidied up in the process.

So, if you are too scared to touch the real techy side of your blog and want a fix that you can do, without calling in help, the above should work for you – it did for me!

missing categories, categories invisible, WordPress 2.6

Do you have a blog theme addiction?

I have and I have it bad. I spend hours and hours and hours looking for just that right look and sometimes I ‘put up with a theme’ until I have time to go in search again.

Case in point – my Proverbs 31 Woman blog. I just can’t find the right look but I would like to portray a woman with old-fashioned values who is a mother at home and a business woman too. So she could be pictured with an apron, or with kids around her, and definitely in a home environment. But I’ve not see many blog themes that match that description. And then it also needs to have a blogroll that categorises blogs although I believe I can add a code for that.

And sometimes when on the hunt I find other templates I love and I end up starting blogs I really don’t need but love the template so I want to use it. Another case in point – Kathie’s Garden. This one is badly in need of new posts.

But sometimes I can find just the right template like the one for this blog – I’m happy with it, and for several other blogs I have or blogs I manage for clients. One of my latest ones is Block’s Indicator – I actually found about 5 different templates ideal for that one so we’re trying them out as the blog ages gradually.

I did eventually find a theme for Proverbs31-woman.com though that I like – although it doesn’t have the look I originally envisioned. But I like the way the categories are done.

So, tell me about your favourite themes or your blog addiction!

blog themes, blog templates, blog addiction, favourite theme

This weekend is a long weekend in Melbourne, Australia, and I decided I’d do some things I’d been planning on for quite some time – this year got busy without notice! And so I’ve spent the past 3 days on and off, browsing through themes at WordPress’s Theme Viewer. I’d been there heaps of times before but had only looked at the thumbnails doing quick searches for particular styles or colours. But the thumbnails can be deceiving and it’s not until you click on the test run that you truly get an appreciation for the theme you’re viewing.

It is really, really worthwhile going through them, but be warned and be prepared to spend several hours going through them – my maths tells me there are 1469 of them to go through! Have fun exploring!

It occurred to me that those who read the ‘how to blog’ posts on this blog might be interested in different blog skins and templates, so I’ve created a new category of links for that purpose. Have fun exploring.

If you manage a website that has blog templates and would like it listed on this site, please do let me know so I can add it. KMT

blog skins, blog templates, blog themes, how to blog

I feel very proud of myself! I did it, I did it!

Instead of my posts at www.soho-life.com/blog/?p=5 being numbers they are now names of the posts http://soho-life.com/blog/2006/08/25/attention-virtual-professionals-in-australia/

The main thing was I had to find out where the .htaccess file resides – it’s in the root diretory of WordPress.

You can log into your WordPress account, choose the Options tab, click on Permalinks, select the Date and namebased option, then click on Update Permalink Structure. Then copy and paste the code it gives you and go to your .htaccess file online (I downloaded it and opened it in notepad), paste the code and then reupload the file. I then went back and viewed my blog and it was working fine. So I’ve now done it with most of my other blogs.

One word of warning from my webhost guy – if you use MS FrontPage (as I do for two of my sites that have a blog hosted with them) FP writes to that file too – so I’m not going to tamper with that one yet till I find out if there’s a way to do the WP change.

FP uses the .htaccess file and so I don’t want to disable the FP Server Extensions or the Permalink structures so I’m reading up on that at the moment. I’ve found
this reference and am thinking I might have to get my webguy to make some change for me – haven’t finished going through it all yet.

If you’ve already gone down this road why not share your experiences with the readers of this blog (and it’s owner). KMT