by ·Comments Off on This is why you never…

This is why you never upgrade a “live” site, especially when you’re dealing with multiple softwares that need to interact together.

WP 3.1 rolled out on Wednesday, and silly me, thinking it’d be fine to upgrade, did so on both t-gk.net and cans-crew.com.  t-gk.net was fine (and why shouldn’t it be?), but cC went into a tailspin.  After multiple hours of frustration, I finally got cC back to basic functionality again, but it’s still missing some key features.

The integration (WP-United) redefines several functions that until WP 3.1, had been in a file that was rarely called.  3.1 moved those into an “always active” file, creating PHP Fatal errors.  Not good.  As a temporary work around, I wound up just renaming the files in WP-United.  It’s at least restored template functionality, but the user-integration method is somewhat borked for the time-being.  As a solution, I *think* that if I comment out the offending functions in WP, all will be well.

This is what happens when you use a piece of software that’s not actively developed right now.  Officially, the last “stable” release of WPU is compatible with WP 2.9 and phpBB 3.07-pl1.  The dev has been disappeared for over 6 months.

I’m thinking at the present time that I should take a serious look at pulling several pieces of his  software and merging them with another one out there that’s missing them.  I don’t feel 100% comfortable doing it, but I think it’s going to have to be done. =(

by ·Comments Off on New Site Rolled Out

I’ve been remiss in updating the rollout of the new site design.  It’s been a rather busy week here, fixing up some of the problems that I’ve run across and doing some other things.

The design is for my gaming community, cC (formerly’ cAn’s Crew).  I’ll spare anyone *not* interested in the gory details by posting everything below the cut.  Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on WordPress & other CMS Systems

WordPress is a great CMS, no doubt about it.  But unfortunately, some of it’s core functionality is lacking, even when using every plugin known to man.  For instance, integrating a phpBB forum into WordPress is trying.  While WP-United solves that to some degree, it’s a one-man dev shop, and he’s been prone to take long breaks away.  His latest plugin (0.8.5) was released long before WP 3.0, and while it seems to work ok, still has some errors.

I’ve been struggling to integrate MediaWiki, phpBB3, and WordPress together.  Basically, WordPress is going to run the functionality of the overall site, including the template.  This is for my gaming community, and we’ve had phpBB and MediaWiki running together for quite some time.  Unfortunately, they’ve always run disjointedly, meaning there was never any real integration between the home page, the forums, and the wiki.

Sadly, Mediawiki won’t integrate with the WP-United setup.  It’s left me very frustrated the last few days.  The idea of adding a few lines of code that call up the WP header may work for WP & Mediawiki alone, but not with WP, Mediawiki, and WP-United.  Maybe phpBB4 will fix that, but that’s easily 12 months away.

The elegant solution, it seems, is to just use the idea of the integration instructions and use another Wiki package.  Seems I’ve found that solution with WikkaWiki, although it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get the data inside our MediaWiki install and convert it to WikkaWiki.  I hope that I can.

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Since I last worked on the halftonreviews design, I really haven’t done much web work (or anything of note that went through to completion).  I’ve started and stopped some different designs, but never really had a focus for anything major.  I did some minor tweaking to a theme for our local alumni association, but nothing I’d consider earth-breaking or shattering.  Probably a total of 45 minutes.

My friend Daniel has developed some modeling software called CurveExpert.  He’s had it for a few years, and this was his site to sell it originally – www.curveexpert.net/original.  It’s all manually done html, low on graphics, and *gasp* ugly.  He didn’t even have a proper domain!  He asked me when he started working on the update to the software what he should do in terms of webhosting, as well as site design.  I suggested that he move to WordPress, PHPBb (for user forums), and get a VPS similar to me (he’s fairly decently versed in Linux.  So he dove right in.  He used the default WordPress theme initially, but went shopping for a theme for the “final release” of his software.

So, about a week ago, he wanted to get the forums to match up with the main site.  I told him that I’d take care of it for him.  I just finished up last night.  Check out the finished product at http://www.curveexpert.net and http://www.curveexpert.net/forums.

It was a good exercise, because I’m going to wind up doing something similar with my gaming community’s site.  We changed providers and the old webmaster has stepped aside.  He builds sites using Rails (a newer method of coding), and I can’t seem to get it to run on our new host.  Not to mention we had a very disjointed feel between all sections of our site.  So, I’m going to start integrating things together, and needed the experience of editing a forum template.  Hopefully this will go somewhat easier than the last one!

by ·Comments Off on SSD Performance

After reading (and admittedly drooling) over the anecdotal performance increases of solid state drives vs. traditional hard drives for the last year or so, I finally took the plunge and purchased one with my holiday cash.  I’ve got to say that I’m truly impressed with the increases, and have some real world numbers of my own to back it up.

To say the numbers are night and day difference would be an understatement of epic proportions.  Just the “feel” of my computer now is amazingly faster.  From the time I press power to fully into Windows 7 is about 35 seconds.  Photoshop loads almost immediately.  I’ve not seen a drastic improvement in my game load times (possibly because the worst part of my level changes are always re-negotiating with the server, something I can’t control).  I chose to do a fresh install of Windows and my programs rather than do a drive image, and the whole process took at least an hour less to perform.  Windows 7 installed in roughly 15 minutes!

If you do decide to make the leap to an SSD, do your homework.  There are various tweaks you need to make to Windows 7 in order to make sure that you get the most out of your drive and extend its life.  Also check into the reliability of the controller software.  While it’s true that drives with the SandForce controller sets are some of the fastest on the market, they have a fairly high failure rate (10-15% based on non-scientific reviews from NewEgg).  I bought the Samsung SSD – which seems to be from observation, the most reliable at the present time.  Time will tell though, as this drive doesn’t have quite the age that some of the SandForce-based drives (like the OCZ Vertex and Agility have).

I’m now debating replacing the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD (albeit a smaller one, since I don’t have 15gb of games on my laptop).  I wonder what sort of increase in performance I’d see from my HTPC with an Atom processor with one of these babies.