I decided to stop being lazy and get around to those upgrades I needed for my site and server:

- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.5 and Apache 2.2.6

- Upgrade Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin for Wordpress

- Upgrade Wordpress to 2.3.1

First, I should admit that I do use the EasyApache installer from WHM, as it has vastly improved to the point where I don’t have to troubleshoot its builds afterwards, nor do I have to go back and reinstall eAccelerator and Suhosin – The current release of cPanel now includes those options and I must say that they have become rather flawless. In other words, it saves me the time of compiling shit by hand when all I have to do is click a few buttons and it’s all done.

Second, I was avoiding the Gallery2/WPG2 upgrade because I remember that the first time I set it up it was hell, and since it was so long ago I didn’t want to go through that again.

Third, since my last Wordpress upgrade I had numerous problems with plugins and as a result I had to tweak most of them because their developers hadn’t released an upgrade yet. I finally decided to just suck it in and upgrade, though it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There are a few things to point out:

- Ultimate Tag Warrior has been discontinued due to Wordpress 2.3.1’s native support for tagging. If you’re a UTW user like me, you can still keep your sexy tag cloud by follow these steps:

1. In your admin section, go to Manager > Import and use the UTW import tool to convert your UTW tags to Wordpress tags. Then go to Manage > Categories and convert your categories to tags too, if they were linked to UTW before.
2. In your theme code where you normally would display your categories, change the code to <?php the_tags(”); ?> instead of <?php the_categories(”); ?> or whatever it was before.
3. Since your tag cloud is now gone, remove the UTW code and replace it with <?php wp_tag_cloud(”); ?>. You can read more about configuring the tag cloud here.

Since removing UTW and upgrading my plugins and WP, I noticed that my site loads a ton faster though, so I’m overall glad that I finally got around to doing this stuff. If you’re lazy like me and still haven’t upgraded to WP 2.3.1, below is a helpful guide on how to do so:

http://polymathprogrammer.com/2007/10/29/upgrade-wordpress-2pt2-to-2pt3/

Yes, it’s another one of those. It seems that every blog has its own tips for increasing traffic, so I decided to add my own tips that seem to have worked for my site

And I use the word “released” very loosely. Yes, I just upgraded my blog to use Wordpress 2.2 after this guy made it sound delicious. No, I don’t regret it, but I do think it would be best to wait for a bugfix. I shall start with the positives:

- It’s optimized a bit more to help your site load faster. This may or may not be noticeable to you, but it probably is to your webhost

- It’s harder to break your site by enabling a botched plugin. I tried to enable Staticized-Reloaded and I got what I interpret as the “Wordpress Screen of Death”:

This is also a shame because this happens to be one bad-ass plugin.

Now for the bad, which outweighs the good:

- Don’t be surprised if your plugin database disappears. From some odd reason, Wordpress could only find it after I created a new plugins folder and copied over my plugin files again….and yes, I had to re-enable all 30 of them.

- WP-Cache no longer works (at the time of this writing), and you’ll find that enabling it will cause some strange behavior on your blog. Oddly enough it also caused my plugin database to be erased yet again

- TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG editor) malfunctions, esp. in Firefox when trying to use certain functions.

- You may need to tweak your theme a bit. I had to make several code modifications to my sidebar and header files.

- Your boobs might shrink in size. Oops, wait…that’s what happens when you stop taking birth control.

Anywho, those of you who are thinking on upgrading, be prepared to spend a few minutes messing with your site and testing your plugins and such. It may be a good idea to wait for a bugfix, which by Wordpress history will probably be out within the next few days.

If you haven’t noticed that my site’s been down for the last hour, it’s because I activated this mailing plugin that completely messed up my whole site to the point where I couldn’t even log in to deactivate it. It eventually came to me that if I move the plugin file it would de-activate automatically and poof, my website came right up. I guess my boss was right when he said I tend to be over-technical and miss the easy things.

Anywho, I’ve messed around with a lot of plugins and I’ve composed a tiny list of ones that you would probably be better off not installing. Some of these result in what Dan would call “the Internet version of ‘the clap’”

On the reverse, if you want to see the plugins that I recommend, you can view my post on the 13 Sexiest Wordpress Plugins.

I decided to post a list of the Wordpress plugins that I’ve found to be the most useful, a majority of which I use on my own site.
To see a list of plugins to avoid, see my other post.

So I found out today from Paul that (pull)wordpress.org got hacked(/pull) and their new 2.1.1 release is tainted. Yes, I said tainted. Someone hacker got down and dirty with the wordpress.org servers and altered the code in the new 2.1.1 release that apparently allows for a remote PHP file execution…then bundled it up for everyone to download and infect their servers with.

So now this means that I have to back up my site, disable my 20-some wordpress plugins, delete my files, download the new version, put the files back in place, then watch as my life slowly fades away. Damn Paul for paying attention to the tidbits of info the wp-admin dashboard.

Read the full article here

To my fellow bloggers, please  upgrade your Wordpress installation to v2.1.2. Ahhhh, now doesn’t that feel better?

Well it seems that everyone has one, and I’d have to admit that a tag cloud is a good way to spice up your site a little bit. I first thought of this when setting up a friend’s site… he wasn’t using a CMS like Wordpress or anything that I could find a quick tag cloud plugin for, so I figured I could probably just make my own. Well, I did and now I shall share it.

This tutorial will show you how to set up a simple tag cloud using PHP and MySQL, with a little bit of Ajax effects
Before we get started, take a quick look at the sample cloud.