Spent a little time playing with the blog set-up this evening.

What are you doing, right now?

That question is asked and answered by my first addition, Twitter. This is a really cool social networking tool. It basically lets me tell you what I’m doing at any particular moment. You’ll see the Twitter News box in the first right hand column. I can post updates to my Twitter News when I can’t blog. I can do the posts from my cell phone, from an IM program (limited selection I think), or from the Twitter site. I’m using the Twitter sidebar widget for Word Press from Velvet Unraveled.

Imieniny

I’ve added a PHP script to list the current name day. Name days, in Polish ‘Imieniny’ are the days on which a particular saints are commemorated. In Poland the “name-day” is important and is typically celebrated like birthdays are celebrated in other countries. In Poland only your closest relatives celebrate your birthday. The Imieniny PHP script is from Adam Brucki. I updated it for UTF-8 compliance and tweaked the output. If I get ambitious, I’ll create a widget out of it.

In short order the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 was a tad more complicated than expected.

I followed the instructions for upgrading exactly. My upgrades tend to fail on the last step – running the upgrade.php. The called for database updates fail completely.

The blog was back and operational, but there were errors. I printed out the errors generated from upgrade.php and did the updates to the database manually using phpMyAdmin. It was a little slow going, but I have enough of a background so that the SQL statements were not insurmountable. Of course I had to dabble while I was in there, and I took the opportunity to delete tables leftover from old plugins.

Everything else appeared to work fine, but my blogroll (links) were a mess. Most did not get labeled (categorized) so I had to do that manually. Once that was done the blogroll was duplicated, with all the links in their respective categories AND in the whichever category was listed first, effectively doubling the links. I tried all sorts of strategies, read the codex, and a bunch of posted help topics. All I could find was info on the php coding changes necessary to display links. Since I use widgets I looked through the links code in the widgets plugin. The code looked fine (hey, what do I know anyway…). I tried toggling various other plugins to no avail.

I got the idea that it was the way the theme (I’ve been using WP-Andreas01 1.3) was handling the links. I really didn’t want to change themes, mostly because of the work I have to do to reset widget order and the back-end coding I’ll have to do to fix my database pages, but I figured I’d invested about 4 hours already so I went ahead.

I had a nice Web 2.0 style theme, Subtle by Glued Ideas. I selected it and everything looked peachy.

In retrospect it was a great experience. I think the blog looks far better under the new theme, less choppy.

I’ll be doing the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 over the next hour or so. Please stand by…

I just finished upgrading this blog to Word Press 2.0.7 It was effortless.

The greatest amount of time was spent backing up the old structure, files, and data (and no, one should never, ever, skip this).

I had two errors in the process.

1. When I ran the upgrade script it gave me an error message on adding the post_status field to the posts table. Most likely because it was already there. The error message told me that my username did not have sufficient permissions in MySQL.
2. When I attempted to re-activate the Flickr widget it brought down the whole site. I’m guessing that was due to the fact that I hadn’t re-activated the widgets plugin yet (hey I was being linear and alphabetical).

The thing that pushed me to upgrade?

I’m hosted by Yahoo. Yahoo web hosting makes a big deal about automatically upgrading people’s Word Press blogs to the latest version. My version was sitting at 2.0.2 for the longest time. The Word Press support forums answered that one… service not as advertised.

I’m of the opinion that any upgraded software version with security issue improvements should be installed, but hey, I don’t run multi-million dollar server farms.