][ geminesis.blog ][

Back on Track

znbailey — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:39:29 +0000

After a bit of a scare with Dreamhost’s control panel (it told me I had deleted my domain at one point!) and DNS propagation (at one point I couldn’t resolve my domain until I forced a manual refresh), I’m back on track with the “advanced” installation of Wordpress here for my corner of the intertubes. The good news is I cleaned up stale stuff in my hosting account, got rid of some old files, and got things up and running in a little under two hours.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as easy as I wished it had been. I started by backing up my blog using the XML export, so at the very least I wouldn’t lose my posts. I wasn’t sure if they database would be reclaimed by the “easy” uninstall - which it wasn’t - however upon finally getting WordPress re-installed in the “advanced” mode, it totally wiped my database and started from scratch anyway. So much for that thought! But importing the old posts was easy after I created the other, non-admin user who I prefer to post under (IMO posting as admin, much like running as root, is bad form).

I confirmed that things were accessible via SSH and installed the reCAPTCHA plugin. Now that normalcy has been restored, I’ll be tackling some of those previously mentioned todo’s at some point this week…

More Issues with Dreamhost’s “Easy Mode” WordPress

znbailey — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:26:29 +0000

So, getting back to setting up and maintaining the blog. After poking around some more, I’ve noticed even more tweaks that I want to make. First, I want to change the favicon for my site. Generally this is declared in the of the site in the format:

Or something similar. However, when I go to manage the theme for this blog, I get the message that I can’t edit any of the theme’s files because they do not have the proper permissions (write permission). This seems to be a very disappointing artifact of the Dreamhost “Easy Mode” WordPress setup. I would have thought at the very least they would allow me to modify these files via the Admin Interface, even if I couldn’t access them directly via SSH.

In a similar vein, I also want to tweak the meta keywords for my blog, which seem to be hardcoded by the theme (which doesn’t make much sense to me either, why doesn’t WordPress include this as a theming variable?). Once again, the theme files don’t have the correct permissions set to change this.

Finally, I want to include a Google Analytics snippet somewhere in the page - it appears there is a nice plugin for doing this, but once again I can’t even drop files into any of the WordPress directories because of using DreamHost’s “Easy Mode” setup. Even if I didn’t want to use a plugin and simply edit the theme’s footer, for example, I couldn’t do that either because of the permissions issue mentioned earlier.

So now I am stuck. I think it’s time to migrate to an “Advanced” installation of WordPress, or ping DreamHost’s tech support to see what they think about this situation.

First Steps: Dreamhost WordPress Setup

znbailey — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 05:40:51 +0000

Getting things set up, and it’s going pretty well. Dreamhost one-click installs certainly make things easy. I opted for the “fully managed” method - we’ll see how that goes. One downside with this is I have no access to the hosted files to add custom themes; luckily it looks like there is a pretty good selection that is simply built-in.

Other changes I made:

Redirected my overall domain to the blog (From the dreamhost control panel, edit your domain and enable “Redirect to URL”).
Playing around with some of the plug-ins
Setting up the title and tagline
First post

Still to come:

I wouldn’t mind substituting the header image of Chicago for a more suitable one of the Atlanta Skyline. This is probably going to require some photoshopping as the image above appears to be desaturated and then orange-ified to go with the “bar” underneath.
Favicon. Why is this the DreamHost icon?
Setting up the “About” page, this needs some biographical information.
More links and additions to the blogroll
Twitter integration?
Last but not least - more posts

Edit: Well after posting this I realize this theme’s styles for lists are not going to do.