ricketyclick

[update: Blogger has acknowledged the problem, and is working to fix it, "despite it being Friday afternoon", which last I am entirely sympathetic with.]

Blogger, the blogging tool hosted by Google, has for maybe a week now been blocking many sites on apparently false charges of being “spam blogs”. Although the sites are still viewable, victims cannot author new posts. Judging by the posts on the Google Help Group here, Blogger is not responding to appeals in a timely fashion. (Granted, though, that they’ve got more than a thousand requests to work through.)

I first became aware of this via David Codrea’s excellent The War on Guns. Codrea was able to activate a sidebar widget (over there on the left) explaining the situation.

Oddly, comments seem to work.

Codrea is, rightfully, I think, reluctant to move, since War on Guns is a very active site with huge archives. (Including the absolutely invaluable Only Ones archive.) It doesn’t help that apparently WordPress cannot import any images associated with Blogger posts. (Can that be right? It seems like such an obvious thing to fix.) Also, he has been using a free Blogger account, and if he goes to WordPress, he’ll have to pay for hosting.

[update: I've been checking around, and it looks like there are migration tools that will in fact bring your pictures over.]

Nevertheless, he’s set up a WordPress site here, holding it in reserve pending resolution of the Blogger glitch.

This is a very tempting tin-foil-hat moment, but it’s not limited to gun blogs, or right-wing blogs, or even political blogs. Knoxviews speculates it might be some kind of anti-spammer bot that Blogger unleashed on itself, which then ran amuck on a rash of false positives. I wonder if it’s a denial-of-service attack which robotically clicks “flag as spam” buttons.

I am so very, very glad I elected to use an independent host (thank you, Hosting Matters), even though I have to pay for the privilege. (I’ve registered the domain through 2011, and my hosting fee is currently $11/month — negligible even on my very limited budget, and there are cheaper hosts out there.) And I think WordPress is a vastly better tool than Blogger, even out of the box with little or no customization.

Fair warning to those who find themselves investing time, effort, and other resources on free sites they do not control.

For a while today, Word Press was throwing an odd error:

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0

I saw this shortly after making three changes–I installed Smedberg’s Atom 1.0 plugin; I’d been playing with directory permissions on my host (Hosting Matters, if it matters); and I’d installed the Java plug-in.

The key turned out to be disabling Java and restarting the browser. Oddly, just to test, I re-enabled Java, and the problem has not yet recurred.

Submitted as a comment here.

OK, Fantastico is ready to update Wordpress to 2.5–I’ve backed up, and I’m ready to go.

Back in a bit.

=====

…Aaannnd we’re back.

Seems to work.  I’ve lost the by-line, I’ll have to turn that back on again.

I’ll be testing several things over the next couple of days.

The server that Ricketyclick lives on has old versions of mySQL and PHP. The way to upgrade them is for Hosting Matters to move me to a new server.

I’ve asked to have that done. This involves pointing DNS to the new machine, so it may take a bit for the links to propagate.

I’ll post when it’s complete.

[update 2008 03 02]
OK, it looks like the move was successful, and while it took awhile for all the DNS caches between HM and myself to refresh, it seems things are working fine.

Once again, I thank Hosting Matters for their quick support of someone flying by the seat of his pants.

[additional info]
After the move was complete, I noticed that although cpanel showed PHP was up to date, mySQL was still stale. I was told that cpanel was just showing it wrong, but a bit more digging showed there are two parts to mySQL. The phpMyAdmin page shows the server version as 5.0.45, while the mySQL client version is 4.1.22. The cpanel page must be reporting the client version.

===

Oh, and I updated WordPress as well; there was a crucial security update I was lacking. I would have done it earlier, but for some reason the Fantastico! installation package wasn’t showing up in cpanel; that turned out to be just a link that went missing when cpanel was updated some time back, which Annette restored for me.

Anyway, it all works, and I’m calling it done.

I’ve been running version 2.0.1 of WordPress, since that’s what Hosting Matters had when I started. I finally decided to update to 2.0.4, since there’s apparently been some substantial security fixes, plus some ordinary bugs and maybe a feature or two.

It turns out that Fantistico, the application management script Hosting Matters offers, knows that I needed to update, and offered to do it for me. (Thanks to Pat for pointing out that Fantastico has this facility.)

So I backed up my entire site, using the backup tool in CPANEL. Then I installed the WordPress backup plugin, and tried to run that. Unfortunately, it stalled, saying it was unable to create the backup directory–it didn’t have adequate permissions. I opened up the permissions on the requisite directory, and tried again. It worked this time, and I tightened up the permissions again.

Then I told Fantistico to run the update:

Click on Upgrade only if
- no files, languages, themes have been modified
- you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress
Info: Your current installation will be backed up.

No, I hadn’t made any changes or mods, but I’m disturbed to find that if I had, they’d be overwritten. I don’t know if this is a side-effect of Fantistico, or if applying the update via any mechanism would do the same (I suspect it would).

I was a bit worried that plug-ins would be deleted, but decided to take a chance, since I’d only done the one for backup.

Upgrading…

Initializing Parameters - Done.
Generating MySQL Backup - Done.
Generating Files Backup - Done.
Copying New Files - Done.

Upgrade completed

Your installation of WordPress was upgraded.
You can view it here: http://ricketyclick.com/blog/

Please save following information. You will need it in order to restore if something went wrong

If you don’t have SSH access, ask support to help you:
- Remove the directory [path]public_html/blog
- Untar [path]/blog.backup.1160156160.tgz
- Empty the database rickety_wrdp1
- Import the file [path]backup.sql into the database rickety_wrdp1
- Move [path]/blog to [path]public_html/blog

Nice to give you restore instructions, but it would have been nicer still if there was a restore option that would do all this automatically.

The only difference I’ve noted is that the blue banner is not as nice as the old one. I liked the rounded corners. Why did they have to change that?

And that’s exactly the sort of thing I’d've changed if I had tinkered at all. This means that if I’d put in a customized header, or made other layout changes, they’d all be gone now. I’m glad now I accepted a stock install. But now I won’t bother to try to tinker.

Good, I guess. One more thing I can strike from my list of stuff I’ll never really get around to doing…

[update]
Huh, now that I’ve restarted, I see the original banner is back in all its rounded, shaded goodness. What the hey…?

Here’s a block quote:

I like block quotes. When they work, they produce attractive, professional-looking pages. And the style of block quotes that this template produces, with the gray bar down the left, are particularly nice.

It’s true. You can always trust a blockquote.

Here’s the deal, though: In WordPress, do not insert bq’s by hand. Use the “b-quote” and “/b-quote” buttons provided by the editor. There are some invisible paragraph tags that get inserted by the buttons; your crude, barbarian hand coding leaves them out, and the processor attempts to put them in, but guesses badly. It’s even worse if you try to include the “p” tags; the processor ignores yours, and insists on putting in it’s own.

Trust me, the XHTML validator gets really pissy about this.

Worth putting up a test post and playing. Use the View Source to see what the server sees.