Robert@PNG

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…
There are 65 plugins used: 45 active plugins and 20 inactive plugins.

Active Plugins…

  AdvancedOptions 1.2
» MountainGrafix (url)
This plugin disables the Post Revision System in WordPress 2.6 and it gives you more Control about the Autosave - Function.

  Akismet 2.1.6
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

  Bad Behavior 2.0.23
» Michael Hampton (url)
Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.

  Better Blogroll 2.8
» Jon Dyer (url)
Pulls a configurable number of links and their categories from the WordPress 2.3 Link Manager and gives you more control of your blogroll.

  Broken links Remover 1.2
» Rajesh (Techblissonline Dot Com) (url)
Eliminate Broken links

  Buy Me a Beer 1.4
» Sherief Mursyidi (url)
Allow your blog visitors to buy you a beer by sending you money through PayPal. A special BlogClout plugin

  Category Icons 2.0.7
» Brahim Machkouri (url)
Assign icons to your categories easily.

  Clean Options Beta 0.9.7
» Mittineague (url)
finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table

  Contact Form ][ 2.0.13
» Chip Cuccio (url)
Contact Form ][ is a drop-in form that allows site visitors to contact you. It can be implemented easily (via QuickTags) within any post or page. This version is *specifically* for WordPress 2.x only.

  CoppermineSC 0.4.6
» Brad Guilford (url)
Include images from Coppermine Galleries in WordPress entries. Based on original script by Lennart Groetzbach that was enhanced and adapted as a plugin by Matthias Jell.

  Dashboard Widget Manager 1.3.1
» Viper007Bond (url)
Greatly enhances your WordPress 2.5+ dashboard by allowing widget re-ordering and storage of preferences on a per-user basis.

  Different Posts Per Page 1.7.3
» MaxBlogPress (url)
Show different number of posts in home, category, search or archive page.

  Excerpt Editor 1.2
» Andrew Ozz (url)
Add or edit excerpts for Posts and Pages.

  FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1
» FeedBurner (url)
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

  FeedBurner Feed Stats 1.0.3
» Jonathan Wilde (url)
A quick and easy way to view the stats for your FeedBurner feed. After activating the plugin, make sure to configure which feed you want to track.

  Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.0.1
» Arne Brachhold (url)
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page

  Lighter Menus 2.7.2
» corpodibacco (url)
Creates Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels. Fast to load, adaptable to color schemes, comes with silk icons, a option page, and a design that fits within the Wordpress 2.5 interface taking the less room possible.

  Maintenance Mode 3.2
» Michael Woehrer (url)
Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Options → Maintenance Mode to get started.

  MaxBlogPress Favicon 2.0.4
» MaxBlogPress (url)
Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files.

  MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer 2.2.3
» MaxBlogPress (url)
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin

  No Self Pings 0.2
» Michael D. Adams (url)
Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

  Page Links To 1.5
» Mark Jaquith (url)
Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.

  Platinum SEO Pack 1.2
» Techblissonline Dot Com (url)
Complete SEO solution for your Wordpress blog.

  Plugin Central 1.41
» Vladimir Prelovac (url)
Wordpress 2.5+ only. Automatically installs and updates WordPress plugins.

  Post-Plugin Library 2.6.1.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins. Make sure you have the latest version of this plugin.

  Random Posts 2.6.1.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of randomly selected posts. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  Recent Comments 2.6.1.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent comments. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  Samsarin PHP Widget 1.3.2
» Chris Pettitt (url)
A text widget with support for including PHP.

  Search & Replace 2.5
» Mark Cunningham and Frank Bueltge (url)
A simple search for find strings in your database and replace the string.

  Search Unleashed 0.2.18
» John Godley (url)
Advanced search engine that provides full text searching across posts, pages, comments, titles, and URLs. Searches take into account any data added by other plugins, and all search results are contextually highlighted. You can also highlight incoming searches from popular search engines.

  SEO Friendly Images 2.3
» Vladimir Prelovac (url)
Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

  Similar Posts 2.6.1.3
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. Don’t be disturbed if it takes a few moments to complete the installation — the plugin is indexing your posts. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  Simple Tags 1.5.7
» Amaury BALMER (url)
Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !

  Subscribe To Comments 2.1.2
» Mark Jaquith (url)
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess

  TinyMCE Advanced 3.1
» Andrew Ozz (url)
Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE.

  Twitter Widget Pro 1.2.2
» Aaron D. Campbell (url)
A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, and can even display profile images for the users. Requires PHP5.

  WordPress.com Popular Posts 1.3.3
» Frasten (url)
Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by WordPress.com stats plugin.

  WordPress.com Stats 1.3.2
» Andy Skelton (url)
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

  Wordpress.com Stats Helper 0.5.4
» Vlad Bailescu (url)
This plugin helps you extract data from wordpress.com stats and use it across your blog.

  WP-Cumulus 1.13
» Roy Tanck (url)
Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

  WP-DBManager 2.31
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.31
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP Google Analytics 1.2.3
» Aaron D. Campbell (url)
Lets you use Google Analytics to track your WordPress site statistics

  WP Security Scan 2.3
» Michael Torbert (url)
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

  WP Super Cache 0.7
» Donncha O Caoimh (url)
Very fast caching module for WordPress. Once activated, you must enable the cache. Based on WP-Cache by Ricardo Galli Granada.