so close…

I almost made it tonight. Honest. It was 11:52, nearing midnight, I was preparing to finish up for the day and go to bed… then I decided to post something on a blog. A frustrating hour later, I have two links saved to try and fix one problem (*cough*revisions*cough* yet again) and a note to myself to *gasp* update a little bit of my WordPress knowledge and rip off the Twenty-Thirteen template to update my code.

Anyway. I have decided. I have plans for this blog. And this domain/website. Two similar but separate plans. :] That’ll get completed in another few years…

update struggles

What is going on? No updates this year, no posts written for almost five months!

I guess I’m growing up (slowly, Oh Viktoria ♫ … *cough*) since all I seem to do is work, or go off to play after work. (Bats Day at Disneyland was fun! ^_^) My websites are sadly near-abandoned.

In fact, I just found out a little while ago about Twitter’s new API thingamabobber, and finally installed a new Twitter feed plugin. (Had to register a Twitter app for that. :x )

It now means that I don’t have an automatic backup of my tweets or favorites. Considering going manual, but I haven’t done it yet. Found a couple Twitter backup/archive plugins (Ozh’ and HL) but Ozh doesn’t work for me and HL creates its own archive which I don’t want to deal with.

Other news… I migrated my websites to a new host! No more sold-to-by-previous-host … host! Kind of sad to leave them (Fluid Hosting), they were really good, kept me informed of server news and other maintenance. They also let me know about the WordPress botnet attack! But I felt guilty using the old host’s package, as if I should have moved over to one of their package offerings, but I couldn’t afford $100 a year, not for hobby sites that don’t even get updated once a season! So I had to move. Messed up a few things in the move, lost a few files without realizing it, because my backup hard drive wasn’t up to date. Ugh.

I also managed to mess up my portfolio website’s WordPress install over the weekend when I installed the Limit Login Attempts plugin! Don’t know how that happened. The only two files I edited were the wp-config file and .htaccess, and somehow that made any WordPress-related pages show up as blank.

When I uploaded other config files to the site, those blogs would show up fine, so I thought it was the config file, but I compared it to a working config file and the only difference was the database name. Ended up deleting/reinstalling WordPress files and deleting/reuploading the database tables. That might not even have been the problem, but my blog came back up. Managed to get the LLA plugin installed on all my blogs.

So… yeah. I have to say, catching up on web development is not fun. I coded a page the other day for work and I struggled, constantly referencing the W3 wiki. Blah. Still don’t know the difference (in usage or implementation) between HTML and XHTML. Still haven’t learned HTML 5 (or even a lot of the eXtensibility of XHTML), just relying on general HTML knowledge.

Not doing much else beyond keeping up with social media sites and watching tv. Oh, I’m trying to pull together a Miwako Sakurada cosplay for Anime Expo in five weeks. Still need to figure out a few bits.

… Okay, maybe things haven’t changed that much. :)

backup Twitter on WordPress

I spent most of today working on a Twitter backup or archive on a WordPress installation. This was something I’d been considering since I learned people were making plugins to port their tweets to their blog. Thought I’d share my experience.

What I wanted: A simple backup of all my tweets from my account and all my favorited tweets of others.

What I kept finding: Integrate Twitter into WordPress! Widget! Cross-post! Update Twitter about new blog updates!

I was dazzled by wp-lifestream and briefly considered backing up all of my social networking accounts. That was until I saw over 500 files for the plugin queued up in my FTP program. I didn’t want a plugin that required almost as many files as the WordPress install itself! (Although someone says he’s working on cleaning up the plugin, wp-lifestream2, so I don’t know how it’ll end up.)

I wanted to try out Tweet Tweet but it requires registration at Twitter and acquiring OAuth? Too much hassle just for a simple archive. But I did really like the possibility of storing Twitter replies to me, and of archiving tables. (Not that I tweet that much, although my current 1500 WordPress entries seems a bit much for me.)

After I found these instructions how to import old Twitter favorites into WordPress, I finally decided on running the Twitter Importer plugin after using the Tweet Importer to import all of my old tweets (versus only the last 20 with Twitter Importer).

Two tips I could have used, instead of having to redo my original import:

One, set the default category to the type of tweet being imported, eg “My Tweets” versus “Favorite Tweets,” if you’d like the tweets separated into different categories.

Two, turn off allowing comments! No reason to leave myself open to spammenting on old tweets!

I’d consider this a good day’s work. Even though I didn’t get paid. (Not enough work at my job at the moment. Bah.)

fun with WordPress

Well I just spent I don’t know how long uninstalling and re-installing WordPress. Fun times, let me tell you! *dead*

A little backstory: went to bed at 4:30 in the morning (technically yesterday…), was woken up off and on from 9 to 11 by someone working with a chainsaw, didn’t get up until 1:30. I spent the day very very tired.

I don’t know when I messed up, maybe it was 11:30 pm? I accidentally uploaded the WordPress config file to the wp-content folder. I thought, Oh crap, and just deleted it. No biggie, right? Wrong.

(I’m going through my old entries and closing entries I don’t like, recategorizing entries, tagging entries… I do this too often, I know. I’m an organization freak.)

I go to edit an entry and find that there’s no place to edit tags. I thought it was the plug-in Simple Tags, so I kept turning that on and off, but that wasn’t it. I kept turning on and off all my other plug-ins, but that wasn’t the problem. (That created more problems, actually. It’s sort of irritating having to rely on plug-ins for my blog to display correctly…)

I realized that not only were tags missing, but all the Advanced Options weren’t nicely hidden away like they usually are.

I tried re-installing WordPress, just keeping my wp-content folder, but that didn’t change anything, so I moved on to deleting my MySQL database and re-importing the SQL file. That didn’t work either, though. (I got a scary message, “Error in ZIP archive: CRC32 checksum is not equal with the value in header information.” Found out I should try to import from the .sql file, not the .zip file. Luckily Steadfast allows importing of sql files up to roughly 8 mb! [Don’t remember the exact number; don’t sue me.] Yes, my blog .sql file is over 3 mb big now. *meep*)

That didn’t fix my problem, though, so I just scrapped my whole blog and put in a completely fresh install, all new uploaded files, all new MySQL database, and re-imported my .sql file.

The problem seems to be fixed now. Except … I realized while writing this post that the post page I was working on was messed up still. Argh! At least I was able to save it, then through editing the draft I got the regular page back…

Hm, nope. Every Create New Post page comes up with that blank look. >_< ARGH! Why won’t WordPress fix itself?!

edit: Wow, I guess it was just that one tab in Firefox (2) that wouldn’t display the page correctly. I spent over two hours trying to fix this on my site when it was just the browser?! *falls over*

try always

Tweaked the layout, so now it’s more normalish and not all above the fold with scrolling divs. Yay! Not sure how I like how it looks in 800×600 resolutions though. (The sidebar goes all the way to the bottom of the page in order to not create a horizontal scrollbar. :/)

Um, I noticed that in the “Write Post” page of WordPress, the selected categories are no longer at the top of the list… Why was that changed? I was a little annoyed when they first switched from alphabetizing all categories regardless of if they were selected to having selected categories on the top, but I got over that. It was very handy knowing without having to scroll what categories I’d placed the post under.

It’s doubly annoying now because the Categories window is so freaking tiny now. (Height-wise, I mean.) Scroll a little bit and I can barely see where the window scrolled to. Three lines? Five lines? I can never tell! Very disorienting.

edit: Vote for this idea! “Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3”