My MySQL Upgrade Battle; The Short Version
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 24, 2009
Goodness, what I’ve been going through with my business blog!
It all started when I tried to upgrade it to 2.9. My business blog is my oldest blog, which I began in March 2005. It was created in MySQL 4.0. To use WP 2.9, you have to be on MySQL 5.0. This meant I had to upgrade my blog to the new database.
The first thing I did was to export a file of all my posts. I did it straight up instead of as a zip file; do both, which I eventually did, just to cover yourself. Then I went to my host, 1&1, and I exported my current database to my computer, then created the new database. All good thus far.
They I tried to import the new database, but there was a problem; my file was too big. You can only upload a maximum of 2 MB on most hosts, and my file was 3.5MB; lots of data over 4 1/2 years.
So I had to contact my host to ask them to do it. They were hesitant, and instead walked me through a process of uploading it myself through a special SSH program. That process didn’t work, though they didn’t know why and I did. I had to use the unzipped file to upload and it only allowed a maximum size of 16MB, but my file was 29MB; you’d think they would have known that.
The next step was on their end. They ended up finding a way to get my old database files into the new database, though it took them half a day to get it done. I went in, changed the WP-Config.PHP file to the new database settings, and all was a go.
Nope, not quite; nothing works that easily. All my posts suddenly didn’t work anymore, and that was problematic obviously. Nothing was coming up, but the strange thing is that I could get into my dashboard without any problems, and I could get into the editing area of each post. This was freaking me out.
My blog was down for two days, as tech support looked at it and determined they didn’t know what to do. They told me they had gone as far as they were allowed, and that maybe I should hire someone to fix my database. Hey, this is me!
The first thing I did was go online to see if anyone else had my problem. I couldn’t find that specifically, but I did come across this video called How To Fix WordPress MySQL Crashed Tables, on a blog called WonderHowTo. I thought that might be the issue, so I logged back into my host control panel and went through that process. One of my tables, WP-Options, had a lot of stuff that I had to run the “fix tables” process on, but it worked almost immediately. I went back to the blog; nothing.
I decided to see if upgrading to 2.9 would work. I tried the automatic upgrade, which has never worked before, and viola, it worked! Well, the upgrade worked; now I have at least one blog where that works. I still didn’t have any of my posts, though, and that stunk.
Still thinking, I decided to try deactivating all my plugins to see what happened. Nothing. However, something stuck out in my mind that I had seen while going through my searches. There was a lot of conversation about permalinks and checking the structure of those things. I went there and didn’t see anything out of place, but then remembered that, on that blog, I had a unique plugin called Dean’s Permalink Migration. I had added it to that blog to remove all the dates from my posts, which get in the way of SEO efforts.
I reactivated that plugin and went to check its settings. Then I hit update options, and all my posts were back; whew!
Then I went back to the plugins page and added the most important ones first and tested; all worked perfectly with the dashboard. Then I added the other plugins one at a time; all worked perfectly once more. Then I thought I’d try something and I added the WP Database Backup plugin, which used to shut all my blogs down; works perfectly.
I decided to go one step further. I went and found All In One SEO to see what would happen. And, of course, it loaded, my dashboard works perfectly, and all is right with the world.
At least on that blog. It seems that by upgrading the database that blog works the way it’s supposed to. As for my other two blogs, I’m still confused because they’re already on 5.0, so I shouldn’t be having any problems with anything. For now, I’m not going to worry about it.
What are the important lessons here? First, always make sure you back everything up, just in case. Export whatever you can to your computer for your protection. Second, if you have to, contact customer service and let them handle some stuff, even if they seem somewhat irritating. I’ll be writing a post about that on my business blog. Third, don’t panic if things don’t go correctly. Fourth, verify to see if you have your blog database first. If you can actually access your information in some way, you’re still running good. Five, test and question everything you have, and you’ll probably figure it out.
And if none of that works, go through forums, or, of all things, mention it on Twitter, and you might get a response or an offer of help. I’ve licked this one; whew! Since I probably won’t be posting on Christmas Day, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday!
All In One SEO Is My Culprit
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 20, 2009
When last we left, I was telling you about some of the plugin problems I was having after upgrading to WordPress 2.9. In my parting shot, I said that it was possible that my problem was having an older theme that might be messing with everything I was trying to do.
I run a theme called Simple Balance, and the version I had was 2.1. I run that theme on two of my blogs, and I love it because I found it easy to customize, though many people might not. Still, the one thing I was missing that was irritating me was the check box, and 2.1 was an older theme.
I decided to see if there was an update to the theme, and there was, Simple Balance 2.2. It said that if you loaded it over what you currently had that it would show the checkbox for people subscribing to comments, and it was also more compatible with WordPress 2.8, which we’re obviously past by now.
I figured this was what I needed, so I downloaded the file and uploaded parts of it. By that, I mean when I was reading the page, it said something about if you were upgrading you could just copy all the files and it wouldn’t erase anything unless you had made changes to the theme. Well, I had made some changes to the theme, so a full upload wasn’t going to get it done for me.
First thing I did was copy my theme from the website to my computer so that I could reverse any changes that didn’t go well. Then I uploaded files I hadn’t changes, along with new files. I then went into files where I had made changes, did a big comparison with what was in each file, and only changed certain things manually.
What happened? Nothing really changed at all. It still showed me as being on 2.1, and I still had no check box. I decided then to try something a bit more radical. I decuded to just copy over the entire file to see what happened. Since I had backed up the original theme with my changes to my computer, I figured if anything went really askew I could fix it.
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I did that and looked at everything. Very few things changed, and all the settings I already had on my blog stayed the same as well; yeah!
Now it was time to look for that check box, but I still couldn’t find it. I’m not sure what the deal is, but it just didn’t come up as part of the theme or WordPress software like it was supposed to.
Now I was back at square one again, but I wondered about something. When I was talking about plugins in the other post, I mentioned how I had added back All In One SEO and how things didn’t work with it. I wondered if I deactivated that one plugin what would happen.
I deactivated it and everything came back except Other WordPress News. I mean almost everything. Broken Link Checker still doesn’t work, but every other plugin works again. So, I was able to put Subscribe To Comments back, as well as WP-Cumulus, and it all works great.
So, it turned out All In One SEO was the culprit. I kind of liked that program, but I had remembered some time back that there had been some discussions as to whether it really benefited you or not. After all, if you do your SEO properly, if you can, that should work just as well, right? Also, for what it’s worth, both Google and Yahoo said they don’t look at meta keywords anymore, and that’s what All In One SEO mainly did, right?
I went online to check some things out. I came across this post entitled What’s Wrong With All In One SEO Plugin, but it’s promoting a different SEO product instead. I came across another post titled All In One Update Extremely Dangerous where it talked about something set by default that, if you don’t know about it, could really kill your blogs search engine position. It also talks about all these people who use the Thesis theme and love the SEO aspects of it, but says that it pretty much locks you into it forever because the day you decide you want a different theme every post you’ve ever done anything with using Thesis loses all the SEO it created for you.
I continued doing some research online, and it seems other people have had problems with this plugin (which I’m now going to call AIO SEO), but for different reasons. Some people have found themselves losing page rank because of something called canonical url. Some have found that their meta tag words disappear. And a few have found that they’ve had some plugin issues. But it doesn’t seem like there’s this big outcry about it.
Too bad for me, I thought. I was ready to kill the plugin for that and other reasons. One was the constant updates; that’s quite irritating. The other was having the plugin keep making you have to activate it after updating it. The third was being hit immediately with their request for donations; it’s big and hard to miss.
Just as I was going to delete it, I noticed they had another update. My first reaction was “ugh, not again.” But I decided to see what the update said, and of all things it addressed problems with other plugins. So I figured what the heck, and upgraded it. This time, it didn’t ask me to go and enable it. I decided to take a look, and I saw that they had changed the settings so that it’s automatically enabled. Then I looked at my dashboard, and saw that it had brought back the WordPress Development Blog and the Incoming Links. Those were the two most important to me, so I’ve decided to keep it for a little while longer, but keep my eyes on it.
That’s on this blog. On the one I’ve upgraded to 2.9, it brought back Incoming Links, but that’s it. So, I’m not totally sold on it yet, and I’ll probably have to wait to see what happens when I upgrade this blog. I think I see at least one more post on AIO SEO coming; let’s hope it’s much shorter than these last two. And, as you can see, I threw in a picture just to break things up. Of course, it’s through Imagekind, which means you can purchase a print if you like it.
Overall, though, it proves just how important it is to keep testing your stuff when things are working properly. If you check your stuff and your dashboard is having problems, deactivate AIO SEO to see if that resolves anything. Then decide what you’d prefer to do afterwards.
WordPress 2.9 Upgrade; My Issues
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 19, 2009
Hey, wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that we had to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6? No matter; now it’s time for WordPress 2.9, and I’ll first say I wasn’t necessarily happy about doing it, but I knew I’d have to test it eventually. So, I upgraded my finance blog; here’s where I am with it.
As you know, automatic upgrades don’t work with me, and WP is saying it’s my hosts fault. So be it; I have a FTP, so I went that route with it. The update itself went pretty well. Of course, before you do any update you always deactivate all plugins.
Then I came back and it said I had to upgrade the database, but that took less than 5 seconds after clicking the button. I went into the dashboard to look around, and all looked pretty good.
Now it was time to activate my plugins. And, as it figures, there were problems. The first problem right off the bat is that WordPress 2.9 is supposed to show you more information regarding your plugins and whether they’re compatible or not. I don’t have that, and I can’t find where I’m supposed to activate it, if that’s what you’re supposed to do. I’m already not a happy camper.
I first activated all that I’d had activated beforehand. Many of the items on the dashboard wouldn’t work anymore. I deactivated them all then started doing them one by one. If one worked, I left it alone and went to the next one. When I was finished testing in that fashion, I now have 4 plugins that won’t work with that site that worked before. Well, let me qualify that. Three of them will work, but mess up the admin. The fourth isn’t working, and it’s giving me an error message. That’s irksome, to say the least.
But y’all know I like to be a bit more thorough than that when I can be. So, I deactivated all my plugins except Askimet and CommentLuv; I knew those two were always absolutely safe. Then it was time to test the plugins that supposedly wouldn’t work at all.
The first one I tested is a plugin called WP-Cumulus. If you look at the bottom right of this blog you see that circling tag cloud. I can’t remember who told me about that, but I like it instead of that long list of tags. It was the program where it was giving me all these error messages. On its own, it’s working on that blog, but it took out the information I was getting in the “Other WordPress News” area.
The second one I tested was Twitter Tools, where I only use one of the 4 options you are given. Running it on its own, it does the same as WP-Cumulus.
The third one I tested was Whydowork Adsense, which I had said I removed from all my blogs, but I hadn’t removed it from that one. Once again, on its own, it works just like the two above.
The last one is Limit Login Attempts, which I’ve talked about recently. It did the same thing as the other three; freaky, right?
As a quick test, I decided to try one more thing. I wanted to see how these things worked if I removed CommentLuv. Limit Login Attempts, Whydowork Adsense and WP-Cumulus all work perfectly; Twitter Tools still shuts down Other WordPress News.
What this points out is that it’s not necessarily one plugin that’s messing everything up, but the compatibility between certain plugins that messes stuff up; heck! That means I now have to figure out which plugins I really want, and what stuff I don’t necessarily care about in the dashboard. I have to admit that I’d never seen Other WordPress News on any of my blogs, and now that I see it there’s a lot of good stuff I’d love to be seeing all the time. But that would be the one I’d have to sacrifice to use most of my other plugins, which I am going to use because they help my blog work better. Decisions, decisions.
I decided to leave WP-Cumulus for the time being and add other plugins one by one to see what might still work well. The first one I added back was Feedburner Smith, which of course runs the Feedburner RSS subscription service; works well together.
Then I added the DoFollow plugin, a must if you want to be able to make your blog, well, a dofollow blog, which helps to encourage comment participation. Everything is still perfect.
Next was to add the Webreader plugin, which is also known as Read Speaker. Now is where there’s the compatibility issue; it was good while it lasted. However, for the moment, I remove this plugin to see if the next one will mess with me also.
The one I add back is All In One SEO, and it definitely won’t work with that one. Now I know that it’s not going to play well with the big boys, but I really want AIO SEO. So I remove WP-Cumulus, only to discover that I still don’t have Other WordPress News. So, that one’s about to be the odd man out, because I need to get many of my plugins back onto that blog.
Back goes CommentLuv. Back goes Google XML Sitesmap. Back goes Limit Login Attempts. Back goes NoSelf Pings, which I’ve never written about, but it works great if you do a lot of internal linking, which I do, and keeps you from pinging yourself all the time.
I add Subscribe To Comments back, and now I have an issue. It takes out the Plugins category in the Dashboard. I want that, so I remove it for the time being and push forward.
I add back Webreader. I add back Twitter Tools; heck, that took out both Plugins and WordPress Development Blog. Nope, I want those, so I remove it for the moment.
On a fluke I decide to see what happens if I load Broken Link Checker. It takes out everything, but finds two broken links. I’ll come back to the links later, but this one easily gets removed again.
I add back WP-Cumulus. I add back Whydowork Adsense. All is pretty okay.
This leaves me with two plugins I want that don’t play well with others; Subscribe To Comments and Twitter Tools. And I’m stuck. People have to be able to subscribe to comments, otherwise why would they leave a comment? That’s the problem with having an older theme, no matter how cool it is. So, for now, it’s there, and I lose those Dashboard things. And since I’ve lost those, Twitter Tools is also back, as I also feel I need that one.
The message here is that it just might be the theme that’s messing you up as much as the plugin; what a drag. Still, I hope all this testing I’ve done helps you out with your blog.
Update on WordPress 2.8 Upgrade
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 19, 2009
A few days ago I wrote about the problem I had upgrading one of my blogs to the new WordPress 2.8, and how things weren’t looking good at all.
Well, y’all know me, and so you know I couldn’t just let that sit and not do anything about it. So, I went to Google and started my research. What I came across was that WordPress 2.8 may not be compatible with some plugins. I had deactivated all my plugins when I updated my finance blog, Top Finance Blog, which I had to do manually because the automatic upgrade doesn’t work for some reason, and when it was finally working of course I had the initial issue I talked about last time, and my dashboard didn’t look right.
What I decided to do was go in and deactivate all my plugins, just to see what came up. Lo and behold, my dashboard was suddenly there, vibrant as anything. This meant it was time to add each plugin back individually to see which one was causing me grief. I did this, and it turns out I had four plugins giving me grief:
* WP Threaded Comments
* Subscribe To Comments
* Backup WordPress
* Tweet My Blog
I don’t know why ‘Subscribe’ and ‘Tweet’ aren’t working yet, but I do know about the other two. It seems that WP 2.8 added a threaded comments to its default theme, and therefore you don’t need a separate plugin for that anymore. I went into the Discussion panel and saw it there, selected it, and went to see how it looked. I saw that it had the threaded comments set up, but there wasn’t a ‘reply’ link to reply to a certain comment.
I knew I still had a problem, so I went to research it again, and came to this post on a blog called I’d Rather Be Writing titled WordPress’s Threaded Comments. It seems that because WP changed its default theme, and most of our present themes don’t have provisions set up in them already for threaded comments, because of age, that you have to do some coding and file changes to get things working and looking correct again. I did them, and now my comments is working great on that blog. This is dicey stuff, though, so if you don’t have the confidence in yourself, find someone who does.
Of course, things are what they are, so after I made all those changes, something happened to my dashboard again. So I went through each plugin in once more, and this time the Broken Link Checker has to be added to plugins that won’t work with WP 2.8. I actually like that one a lot, so I’ll be doing further research on that one, as well as the others, to see if I can figure out what the deal is. This means more will be coming at some point, but at least now I’m happy with what I’m seeing on my other blog’s dashboard.
Centering Images in WordPress 2.6
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 12, 2008
This is going to be a relatively short post, for once. I’ve always had problems centering images on this blog, which has limited me to always having to have the banner ads below my posts, plus not allowed me to add any image ads to the side of my blog.
I went online to do lots of research, and learned that a lot of people were having problems centering anything on WordPress 2.6, so I wasn’t alone. I read lots of tips, but none of them applied to my situation, and I realized pretty quickly that all these blog templates are pretty different because all the creators did something just slightly different than everyone else. And I realized that my problem was contained within the CSS file, which many people probably shouldn’t try to mess with.
But I’m not “many” people, so I went searching. I tried a few things here and there, always remembering what I did so I could take it back. Finally, I saw down near the bottom a tag that said “Images”, and saw that it was left justified. So, I changed that from “left” to “none”. Lo and behold, my image centered, and all life is grand once again.
Doesn’t mean I won’t continue posting banner ads, but now I have more choices of what I can do. This may not work for everyone, but if you decide to go looking and find something like this, it just might work for you. Good luck, but be safe and always remember what you did.
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