When Brains Fly » wordpress

Whoo! WordPress Upgraded and Akismet Installed

Ryan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:43:23 +0000

Finally, I have upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4 and installed Akismet seemingly successfully. Spam be gone! I also set up svn upgrading of WordPress so that I don’t have to do so many steps next time around.

For reference, I used:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups to backup my stuff first
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress to do the upgrade
And then realizing that I could upgrade by svn, I used http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion. Very nice.

Update: It has been nearly 24 hours and I have gotten no spam comments to moderate in my inbox. Akismet caught 8 of them. Thank goodness. That was really annoying to see a new email every couple hours only to realize that it is spam. Kinda makes me really appreciate Gmail’s spam filter, even though it has screwed up somewhat majorly once.

Edit (2009-12-15):
To upgrade to the latest stable version of wordpress via svn, run the following command from /home/public/ (assuming 2.8.6 is the latest stable version):

svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.6/ .

and then go to http://www.whenbrainsfly.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Bandwidth

Ryan — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:16:06 +0000

I have used 10.73 MB of bandwidth over the last three days based on my web access log. That feels like a lot. I think most of it is due to the large sizes of the WordPress admin php pages. Under NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN), I am paying based on how much bandwidth I use, which is good because I don’t expect to have many readers right now and so under NFSN’s payment plan, I predict paying substantially less than $6/month – a typical price for other cheap web hosting.

Right now, I am being charged at $1 per GB transferred. Since I have used 10MB from the website and another 20MB from downloads and uploads (mostly from installing Movable Type and WordPress), I have to pay $0.03 for the four days that I have had this site. With that trend, I would have to pay about $0.23/month for bandwidth. I also have to pay $0.01/day for MySQL and $0.02/day for email forwarding. Altogether, I would have to pay about $1.13/month. That’s pretty cheap! Thus, NFSN is awesome.

Edit: I forgot to mention that NFSN also charges for storage at the rate of $0.01 per megabyte-month, which isn’t much, unless I am storing like a GB of stuff on my account.

Edit 2: I’m using about 8mb right now, so $0.08 per month. Pretty good. =)

Switch to WordPress

Ryan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:25:00 +0000

After using Movable Type for an hour or so and trying to customize it, I found it to be irritatingly slow. I tried installing the Open Source version, but it was not much faster. It would take around 30 seconds to publish and 20 seconds to go to a different admin page, which got really frustrating after a while, especially after installing Movable Type four times (see previous post).

So, I decided to switch to WordPress, one of the other two popular blogging applications (the other being Blogger). The install was very simple and very fast. For my reference and yours, here is what I did:

First, I created a MySQL database called wordpress. Then, I downloaded latest.tar.gz from the WordPress website onto my web server. Next, I unzipped that file and moved all of its contents to /home/public/. Then, I copied the file config-sample.php to config.php, and in config.php, I entered my database information and put in four security keys randomly generated from the wordpress random key generator. Finally, I opened a web browser and went to wp-admin/install.php where I entered a name for my blog and my email address, hit continue, and then I was done! Amazing.

I ran into some early problems with permissions, such as uploaded images not appearing. So I changed the group of all of the files in /home/public to web, changed all file permissions to 644 so my web server could write to them, and changed the permissions for /home/public/wp-content/ and /home/public/wp-content/uploads to 775 so that my web server could put my uploaded files in the uploads directory. I think that was it.

Finally, I searched for a brainy WordPress theme and first found Big Blue Brain Theme but later found Brain Power Theme, which is an awesome theme. I tweaked it in many places to make spacing, color, and other little things nicer to me, and this modified theme is what is currently styling this site. I hope you like it too!

WordPress is not lightning fast, but not agonizingly slow either, so I think I’ll stick with it. Plus, this theme rocks!

Reference:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress