Ideas….

Hello All!  This is just me testing out my new Google Wave WordPress plugin called wavr.  Below is a test wave I set up.

and if you don’t have a google wave account, here is what it looks like.  What’s nice about it is that you can customize the look with different background and font colors.  Also pretty cool, I can edit the wave from within my blog post.  I have to be logged into my wave account (either in another browser window or the same browser window if i’m using tabs).

I can definitely see the usefulness of this.  I’ve seen some conferences try to figure out ways to aggregate information.  By adding the twitter bot and other bots, I may be able to use wave as a quick and easy way to aggregate information.

A few bummers:

1. default colors are less than ideal, but luckily you can change that. so for example right now my code to embed the wave reads: wave id =”your-wave-id” bgcolor=”#FAEBD7″ (enclosed within brackets)
2. people that don’t have a wave account can’t see the wave.  here is what they see: this is kind of a big let down.  it would be useful if they could at least view the wave…but unfortunately that’s not the case.

I have a WordPress MU site that I wanted to move to a new server, and here’s how I did it.  I’m writing this because I did it once, and then forgot how to do it again.  I have a mind like a sieve.

1. First I tarred up all the files for the directory:
   

   tar cvzf wordpress.tgz wordpress/

    

2. Then I backed up the mysql database:
   

   mysqldump -u root -p wordpress > wordpress.sql

    

3. When you back up a MySQL database it comes out as a simple text file.  You can open it up with a text editor (I have a mac and use TextWrangler).  I then use a simple find and replace in my text editor to find all the old URLs and replace them.  If you’re supper fancy you can use vi (which sometimes I do when I’m really really lazy and don’t want to go into a gui…yes I know that makes me a loser):
   

   :%s/old.url.com/new.url.com/g

    

4. The next thing that I did was move the sql file and the tar file over to my new server.  I then created the database in mysql:
   

   create database wordpress;

   and then imported the mysql export file into the database that I just created:

   mysql -u root -p wordpress < wordpress.sql

   Afterward, I double check that the database really is populated, but that’s because I’m a cautious person.  So I do a really quick:

   use wordpress;
show tables;

   Before moving on.
    

5. I then moved the tar file into the web directory and unzipped it:
   

   tar xvzf wordpress.tgz

   This will unzip all the files and create the wordpress directory.
    

6. Finally you’ll want to go into your wp-config.php file and look at your database settings.  There is a section that reads:
   

   // ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'wordpress'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
define('VHOST', 'no');
$base = '/wordpress/';

   Using this information you’ll want to create a MySQL user according to this information (or you can create any old user and change these values in the wp-config.php file).  The MySQL query to create the user referenced above is:

   grant all privileges on wordpress.* to 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'wordpress';

   So now you have created the same wordpress user that you had on your other wordpressmu site.
    

7. At this point I like to double check that everything worked as planned.  You’ll want to go to your new URL and make sure that everything that was there before is there now.  Also tip:  don’t delete the old wordpressmu site until you’re certain the new one is working properly.
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I have a VERY out of date WordPressMU I’m trying to update (v. 1.0). After getting nowhere, I decided (with the help of the boss man) to export out all of the blogs and then reimport them into the new installation.

First thing I ran into was that the file was too big. I adjusted my php.ini settings for the filesize (restarted apache) and that did nothing but give me a new error message with a lower limit than before (!). So then I asked my friend Google about the error message and he told me about the instructions on Asher Bond’s Blog.

So yay, now I can import the blog. Nope, that would be too easy. Every time I went to upload it, the process timed out. Luckily I remember seeing something in the php.ini file that set the processing time:

max_execution_time = 600 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 600 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data

And yes I really did need it that high, the blog is 3 years of (just about) daily podcasts.

Also for those that have never done it, WordPress will actually go out and fetch the files from the old blog and move them into the new blog. This is wonderful, and whomever at WordPress thought this up should be given a medal.

So anyway, I record all of this here in hopes that one day others will have the same problem and run across this post (or I run into the problem and need to know what the heck I did to fix it).

Next on the list: converting the podcasts from the defunct PodPress plugin to a plugin that’s useful. Options are: PowerPress and Podcasting. Leaning toward Powerpress because they are a company.

After that: LDAP and WordPress integration possibly using the wpdirauth plugin. I have to say I’m quite surprised that there aren’t more ldap plugins out there.