MacManX.com

WordPress Support Forum All-star Volunteers

James — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:55:40 +0000

WordPress is an amazing open source blogging platform, built by volunteers and supported by volunteers. This morning, I published what I hope to be the first annual WordPress Support Forum All-stars, honoring those who have gone “above and beyond” by volunteering countless hours on the forums. If you have ever received help from one of the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums, don’t be afraid to let them know how much you appreciated their help.

How do you get to be a WordPress Support Forum volunteer? Just start answering questions on the forums. I look forward to seeing you there!

Neo is Scott Pilgrim

James — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:23:07 +0000

It sure has been a while since I’ve posted a video here, but I have to share this amazing mashup of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The Matrix Trilogy. Plus, this gives me chance to start using Viper’s Video Quicktags again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enter Weblog Tools Collection

James — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:17:14 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection, created by Mark Ghosh, has been the number one source of WordPress news for well over six years. Just two days ago, I applied to a newly open news editor position, and I am now trilled to announce that I was hired! In fact, my first post detailing WordPress’ impending requirements change has just been published! You can expect most of my WordPress-related posts to be published on Weblog Tools Collection from now on, while I continue to post about items of personal interest here.

Dragonas in Burbank

James — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:00:11 +0000

We’re just a little bit less than a week away from our next concert. Join us on July 16th at The Park Bar, located at 2007 West Burbank Boulevard in Burbank, California. The show starts at 8:30pm with a $7 cover. We’re looking forward to seeing our largest crowd yet, so please bring your family and friends!

WordPress 3.0

James — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:16:28 +0000

WordPress 3.0 has been officially released. There’s quite a bit that has been changed, improved, and added, so watch the video and read through the release notes to find out what’s new. I upgraded several blogs yesterday via the automated updater in a matter of seconds with no problems, but there are a few known issues, so check this thread before upgrading.

Moving the Blog

James — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:38:09 +0000

Five years ago, I installed this WordPress blog in a subdirectory at macmanx.com/blog/, imagining that someday I would have some sort of fancy website at macmanx.com, and that this would be nothing more than just a blog. Since then, I have spent quite a bit of time turning this blog into more than “just a blog.” About two weeks ago, I finally made the decision to move this blog out of macmanx.com/blog/ and put it where it belongs, at macmanx.com. The process was relatively simple using just phpMyAdmin, a plain text editor, and an FTP or SFTP client. There were no problems during the overall process, but the cleanup took a bit longer than expected. For the benefit of everyone reading this, I’d like to share my process, the problems that I ran in to after the move, and how I eventually resolved them.

The following instructions are Mac-specific using the plain text editor Fraise and the FTP/SFTP client Cyberduck, but they can be easily reinterpreted using any Windows or Linux-based plain text editor and FTP or SFTP client.

Backup your WordPress database. (Never alter the database without a fresh backup on hand.)
Download and install Fraise.
Download and install Cyberduck.
Go to Settings/General in your WordPress admin panel and change the two URL values to the new location.
Export your WordPress database with phpMyAdmin.
Open the .sql file in Fraise.
Navigate to Edit/Find/Advanced Find & Replace, then find and replace all occurrences of “/old-directory” with “/new-directory”, or replace “/old-directory” with a blank field if you’re moving out of the old directory and into the root like I did. (You could make the task more specific by finding and replacing “yourdomain.com/old-directory” with “yourdomain.com/new-directory” etc, but this will only affect absolute URLs and completely ignore relative URLs.)
Save the file and quit Fraise.
Return to your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
Check all of the tables and choose “Drop” from the pull-down menu.
Navigate to the Import tab, choose your edited .sql file, and click the Go button.
Access your server via Cyberduck and navigate to the blog’s directory.
Select all of the files and move them to the new directory.
Access your WordPress admin panel at the new location.
Re-save your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in the admin panel.
Re-save your upload directory at Settings/Miscellaneous in the admin panel.
Edit (or create) the .htaccess file in your root directory with the following content: “Redirect permanent /old-directory/ http://www.yourdomain.com/new-directory/” or “Redirect permanent /old-directory/ http://www.yourdomain.com/” if you moved out of the old directory and into the root like I did.
If you have a sitemap plugin, like Google XML Sitemaps, make sure that the sitemap location is still set correctly and refresh your sitemap.

Everything should be working perfectly. The whole process should only take a few minutes, but there is going to be some cleanup involved, and that may take a while.

You may notice that in step 7, we used Fraise to easily replace every reference to the old directory with the new directory, or we removed the references altogether. This is certainly easier than changing everything by hand via the admin panel, but it can be a bit destructive. For example, I used Fraise to completely remove all references to “/blog”. This had the desired effect of changing things like “macmanx.com/blog/about/” to “macmanx.com/about/” throughout the entire blog, which saved me the time of hand-editing almost 3,000 instances. Well, I’m sure some of you remember the Blogroll Dive, and how the links looked like “macmanx.com/blog/2007/11/blogroll-dive-11307/”. Unfortunately, they became “macmanx.com/2007/11/roll-dive-11307/”. Notice the problem? In order to fix this, I had to re-open the database in Fraise and find and replace all occurrences of “/roll-dive” with “/blogroll-dive”. This also affected some links to other blogs, but Google Webmaster Tools was kind enough to point out the problems after re-indexing the blog, so I corrected those via the admin panel.

All of that aside, the move went quite well, and the ease of using Fraise to find and replace almost 3,000 references to the old directory far outweighed any time lost during the cleanup afterwards.

The First Dragonas Concert

James — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:18:05 +0000

Our first concert has been officially declared a success by Clan Chieftain John Dragoo! It was great to see all the people who made the trip out to North Hollywood to hear us. If you were not able to make our first performance, we did take some photos for you, and we look forward to seeing you at our next concert.

Tune in to Clan Dragonas for the latest news, photos, and other miscellanious fun.

The Blog has Moved Again

James — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:52:11 +0000

After five years, I have finally given in and decided to move both this blog and Sarah’s to the root directory. That’s right, no more /blog/ and no more basic redirect in the root. Five years ago, we planned on having some well-developed sites that included the blog along the side, so we placed the blogs in the /blog/ directory and a simple redirect in the root there for the time being. What actually happened is that over those five years we wound up developing our blogs into the sites that we wanted in the first place, so I felt that it was time to give them the placement that they deserved.

Fortunately, modern redirects have evolved in such a way that you don’t need to do anything, unless you really want to change your bookmarks or resubscribe to the feed. Everything should be redirecting to the proper place. Unfortunately, not all subscription services will be able to redirect to the new feed, but I’m hoping that they will at least make some sort of notice regarding the problem so that you can re-subscribe to the new feed URL.

I’ll be posting a writeup of the whole move process in a few days, so If you notice anything wrong, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

For your convenience, please feel free to use the large buttons below to re-subscribe to the feed and/or re-bookmark the blog.

Clan Dragonas

James — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:59:19 +0000

I would have announced this sooner, but Sarah beat me to the punch, so I thought I’d wait until the website was done. For the past few months I have been lucky enough to play flugelhorn, and most recently sing backup vocals, with the awesome Clan Dragonas! To paraphrase the About page, “Clan Dragonas embodies Rock music as it was originally envisioned: an emotive and spontaneous performance art. . . . a Dragonas show will leave you spellbound.”

Speaking of the About page, I just finished putting together our website, so I hope you enjoy it.

Our first official concert is just a few days away on June 2nd at 8pm in Skinny’s Lounge. We hope to see you there!

Private Consulting

James — Sat, 08 May 2010 01:10:59 +0000

I don’t know why I didn’t think about announcing this before, but I am currently available for hire as a private consultant on WordPress, web management, and Mac OS X.

I have been an avid WordPress user for over five years, the manager of three WordPress blogs, and a frequent WordPress Support Forum volunteer. Over the years, I have mastered several web management tools and techniques that exceed those of simply WordPress. I have been a Mac user for over twenty years and consider myself very knowledgeable in the operating system and a variety of applications. The scope of what I can cover is quite broad, but as a general rule, I will never charge for a job that I can’t handle.

Please contact me for more details.