Running a self hosted WordPress Blog…

I reckon is a bit like owning a British motorcycle (well, one of the older models anyway)! Going under the hood to tinker is driven firstly by the inherent need for maintenance but also driven by the passion that goes along with “riding” either one of these machines.

The “fiddly” nature of a self hosted WordPress site is its greatest asset but can also become a ball breaker for the uninitiated. For those that are looking for total flexibility in what they want out of a blog then the self hosted approach is the way to go. Those that just want a blog so that they can get on with the business of writing and not have to ever go under the hood then a hosted blog, whether WordPress or any of the others available, is probably a better choice.

(After today, I’m going to stop posting about blogging, WordPress and widgets. And refocus on what this blog is about… Papua New Guinea). Famous last words!

The last 24 hours have been absolutely mad!

These are the sequence of events that have taken place since yesterday after reading the following story my newsreader by Matt from the WordPress Development Team:

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

1. I make an instant decision that I’ve been spending enough time with my blog lately and will hold of upgrading to WP 2.6.
2. But… why not print out the upgrade notes for some “light” reading in the evening! Done.
3. After dinner, read upgrade notes and start going through the upgrade steps in my mind.
4. A little more reading and a plan is born!
5. By 10:00pm – my decision to hold of with the upgrade goes out the window and I sit down at my laptop, make a connection to the net and start getting that tingling feeling inside. One the one hand nervous – as one is befoe any upgrade yet excited at the prospect of being able to use some of the new features of WP 2.6.
6. At 10:01pm – I download the Maintenance Plugin for WordPress and enabled it – which basically puts the blog site in maintenance mode.
7. Did the mandatory backups of data and other WordPress files – heaven forbid having to do a restore!
8. Deactivated all plugins! (30 odd).
9. Via Bluehost (Hosting Company) ran the WP 2.6 upgrade using the SimpleScripts add-on service.
10. 10:30pm – upgrade complete!
11. Better check the blog… still there!!
12. Started turning on the plugins one by one – double checking settings and functionality. All seems to be progressing well!!
13. The Admin Bar plugin seemed to cause some issues and I have since turned it of.
14. I took advantage of the down time and re-installed WordPress.com Stats after turning it off a week or so ago. All my stats are now being collected via WordPress.com Stats and also Google Analytics. I played around with Statpress and a plugin from Tantan but have since ditched these due to reliability issues.
15. And finally by 11:15pm – I turned Maintenance mode of and blog was back on the air!!

In addition, since yesterday I have resolved the following issues:

• The TinyMCE Advanced plugin is now working “hunky dory” under WP 2.6 after WP resolved quite a few bugs in the underlying code for their TinyMCE editor.
• Occasionally I use ScribeFire (a Firefox extension) for offline blogging. On initial testing it failed to connect to my site and after a little fiddling under the hood I found some .htaccess directives causing this issue. Fixed!
• Enabled the new WP 2.6 bookmarking feature.
• And to top it all of… I have configured and turned on Google Gears which is now supported under the latest version of WP!! The turning of Gears has essentially doubled the performance when using the WP Administration facilities due to its caching features.
• A few plugin developers must have found some bugs with their code and released upgrades to their plugins within a day of the release of WP 2.6. These I have also been installed.

That’s about it – but before I go I just want to share with other WP bloggers – pondering whether to upgrade or not – my “under the hood” setup:

1. Laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 with Firefox (latest V2) over a piddly dialup.
2. My hosting company is Bluehost.
3. Used the SimpleScripts service provided by Bluehost to do the upgrade (Is that cheating?)
4. WP Theme: 3 column K2 RC6 (latest build) with my own style but no mods to K2 templates.
5. A grand total of 31 widgets.
6. Plugins? Thought you’d never ask! See below….

Plugin Stats…
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Active Plugins…
[active_pluginsused]