Archive for September, 2007

This is one of the most simple building blocks of Coldfusion, but you have to start somewhere when learning a new language.

#variable#

You just have to surround the variable in those tags. All Coldfusion tags, I read today, start with the “cf”. That coupled with the fact that it is a tag language, with an opening and a closing tag is supposed to make the language easier on designers used to just HTML programming.

Now, can it be easier for designers and a better language than PHP? I know my friend would say no way. And I do know that it is way too early in the game for me to evaluate that with an expertise, if ever. But I read a number of articles today that had good points as why it is better. I will just have to have the time to continue on the path to evaluate that for myself.

I knew when the truck left Pittsburgh a couple of days ago that my time had finally come, but I just wasn’t sure when.

I got ahold of Troy yesterday, and he said he was in Columbus, and thought he would be my way in the next couple of days. It sounded like he had to swing down to Cincinnati first, and since Mudmantim wasn’t going to be free until the weekend, would stop by my place next.

Well, he called tonight and said that he should be at my place by around noon or 1. I am really pumped, the timing is just about perfect. I have the day off tomorrow, and in the next couple of days I should be moving out two more games, so I should have the room to move things around and rearrange them as needed.

Got more photos last night in email last night from Richard of the Alligator tail, so I was able to finish up that piece of vector artwork.

Next: Onto the crazy monkey riding the pig.

Wow, what a morning.

In a matter of minutes, I tried to do two things in Wordpress, one upgrade and one switching of a site to a new folder and…I broke both sites.

I read the instructions in the codex for moving a website to a new folder. (Taken from the Wordpress website -
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress)

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

1. Create the new location using one of these two options:
   1. If you will be moving your WordPress core files to a new directory, create the new directory.
   2. If you want to move WordPress to your root directory, make sure all index.php, .htaccess, and other files that might be copied over are backed up and/or moved, and that the root directory is ready for the new WordPress files.
2. Login to your blog.
3. Go to the Administration > Options > General panel.
4. In the box for WordPress address (URI): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files.
5. In the box for Blog address (URI): change the address to the new location, which should match the WordPress address (URI).
6. Click Update Options.
7. Logout of your blog.
8. (Do not try to open/view your blog now!)
9. WordPress 2.0 only: Delete the folder wp-content/cache.
10. Move your WordPress core files to the new location. This includes the files found within the original directory, such as http://example.com/wordpress, and all the sub-directories, to the new location.

Well, I followed the instructions. I applied changes and I got a 404 error page saying that wp-login.php didn’t exist.

So, I just figured that since the directory was pointing to a new place now, it wouldn’t be finding the files. But the instructions said nothing about a 404 error message that would give no indication of whether the changes were actually applied or not. Not to mention, the instructions didn’t remind you to make the directory and make a copy of the files first, before applying any changes. That was my mistake.

So, for an hour while I copied the files on the server, I had no idea if what I just did was going to work or not.

Forunately, it did. I felt better. But then, there was the upgrade on the other blog.

This was the question I was grappling with yesterday. Since the site is database driven, how do you make one specific page act differently than the rest? I needed the whole width real estate on the church’s blog for a calendar, but I wanted the sidebar on every other page, just not that one.

Well, in most templating systems, you have different templates you apply to different pages. It just seemed to be downplayed when you are considering using Word Press as your CMS.

I happened to stumble across this option when searching for a solution. There is a drop down menu when you create a new page called “Page Template” that has a list of available templates. But how do you add your own to that list?

Well, you create a page in your theme, name it what you want, and include this comment designation at the top, inside PHP tags, so that Wordpress parses it and knows that it should be used as a page template;

/*
Template Name: (Name)
*/

Where (Name) is the name you enter that you want to use when choosing it as your option. Works like a charm. You may have to change some of your CSS to make the new page work if you have a sidebar in your other templates, but other than that it’s pretty simple.

Wow, what a crazy amount of trial and error, mostly because I forgot the “De-activate” plugins step.

So, I followed all of the backup processes but the plugins piece. I didn’t realize this until after I was thinking about what could be causing my problems.

Here the first post I piggy-backed onto which was a little off topic, pertaining to RC 1, and the post I started in the Wordpress forums.

Needless to say, it got me more comfortable moving around in PHPMyAdmin, dropping tables, doing double installs of Wordpress, exporting sql files and modifying them in PSPad (Preserving breaking spaces). I had found in comparisons of the base installs that some of the tables got removed completely in the new install, and new ones were added. Then I found out all about the totally new schema for Wordpress on the back end, reading some posts.

You running plugins that might query THAT table? As Ryan Boren stated: “The big schema change is the dropping of the categories, post2cat, and link2cat changes in favor of the new terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly.”

I assume that the re-organization mostly has to do with speeding up Wordpress 2.3 and supporting the new tagging feature in 2.3. I could read all about it in the changelog on the Wordpress website I am sure, but I am not that hardcore yet and I may not completely grasp it anyway.

In the end, once I did things right, reuploaded what I had, going back to version 2.2 of Wordpress, de-activating plugins and dropping and re-importing all of my tables I got up database update to work. I got rid of my “You don’t have permission to access page” error, I think I got that error because of a partially bad install, and things were back up and running.

I couldn’t tell you how exciting it was to have my data back up, and working. I was getting pretty scared there for a little bit with 1400 posts on the line.

I got another sample from Allied Electronics, 5 of them to be exact. I had gone to Meunier downtown to pick up pretty much the same part a couple of weeks back, but was confused. The replacement part I got was rated the same, but it was physically twice the size of the diode I pulled off of the chassis. So, I waited.

I called Allied, and they gave me the information about the rating so I just had them send me a few. I assume they will work just fine. I have to figure out the polarity on the board and I should be good to go. The original part number was(_), and the equivalent replacement today is a 1N5404.