While planning to move a site to a new server, I thought I’d try to restore from one of these backups. Surely downloading and uploading 4 TAR files would be easier than downloading/uploading thousands of files and images. It was, but there was a bit of trial and error.

In an effort to speed up the process, should I ever need to restore a crashed site, I’m going to document the process here.

1. First of all, I had to download all the necessary files from my Amazon S3 account. This was basically the httpdocs folder, plus the MySQL.

2. Next, upload the files to the root web directory.

3. SSH into the site and navigate to the root of the site.

4. Combine the files, which have been split into 300MB chunks, using the ‘cat’ command. The filenames should resemble httpdocs_date.tar.gz.p00, httpdocs_date.tar.gz.p01, etc. The syntax looks like this:

cat httpdocs* > filename.tar.gz

That will combine all parts into one file named filename.tar.gz

5. Decompress the GZipped file using:

gzip -d filename.tar.gz

and then decompress the TAR file using:

tar -xvf filename.tar

6. That should restore all the files to the httpdocs directory. There’s one last thing you may need to do. You might have to change the owner of the httpdocs directory using the chown command, like this:

chown -R USERNAME httpdocs

That will let the public see the files once the database is restored (that’s a topic for another post).

Posted via web from Phillip Duncan’s posterous

More than just a visual overhaul (which was needed), WordPress 2.5 will feature better admin functionality and an improved user interface thanks in part to Happy Cog.

There’s a nice article on WordPress.org detailing the work that went into the new Admin interface. Check it out.

The features that worry me the most are:

I’ve achieved all of those using plug-ins and custom PHP files. Seeing that list of features makes me wonder how it will affect my plugins and if I’ll need to re-do several sites to support the “out-of-the-box” features to stay compatible with WP 2.5.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta is now available for download and one of the new features is WebSlices. By adding a few specific class names to content blocks, IE will essentially syndicate the content.

<code><div class=”hslice” id=”1”>
  <p class=”entry-title”>item – $66.00</p>
  <div class=”entry-content”>high bidder:buyer1
    …
  </div>
</div>

Using the above classes will generate content the user (or IE8 user) can subscribe too. Why not RSS? Is it because that’s compatible with other software, browsers, and readers. Microsoft wanted something that would just work for Internet Explorer.

Do they honestly thing any developer will support or use this? Hmm… let’s see… I can create a RSS feed for my content that anyone can use (even IE7 and IE8 users) or I can create the WebSlice just for IE8 users. The only use this will get will be from FrontPage/Expression users who do not know any better.

Even Microsoft says it’s just like RSS on their site:

WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Please Microsoft, just make a good, fast browser for people to use. I was willing to admit IE7 was a step in the right direction. It’s fast and renders content relatively well and has good CSS support. It was only a matter of time before they had to go and ruin it.

For instance, in DotNetNuke when you search for something in the site it will return a list of links to what it finds. What it won’t do is display something friendly like “No Search Results Found” if it doesn’t find anything. Dumb and not very user friendly.

I did find what I thought would be the solution at ecktwo, but it didn’t work in Firefox due to the

document.getElementById("search").innerHTML

which doesn’t work in Firefox within a table, which is what the Search Results are generated using the ASP.NET grid view. So, I thought I’d take a stab at building something that worked for both IE and Firefox.

Make a copy of your admin\Search\SearchResults.ascx file and then open the file in notepad. Apply the following code that I’ve highlighted in red:

<%@ Control Language=”vb” AutoEventWireup=”false” Explicit=”True” Inherits=”DotNetNuke.Modules.SearchResults.SearchResults” CodeFile=”SearchResults.ascx.vb” %>

<asp:Datagrid id=”dgResults” runat=”server” AutoGenerateColumns=”False” AllowPaging=”True” BorderStyle=”None”
PagerStyle-CssClass=”NormalBold” ShowHeader=”False” CellPadding=”4″ GridLines=”None”>
<Columns>
<asp:TemplateColumn>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label id=lblNo runat=”server” Text=’<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, “ItemIndex”) + 1 %>’ CssClass=”SubHead”>
</asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateColumn>
<asp:TemplateColumn>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:HyperLink id=”lnkTitle” runat=”server” Name=”result” CssClass=”SubHead” NavigateUrl=’<%# FormatURL(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”TabId”),
DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”Guid”)) %>’ Text=’<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “Title”) %>’>
</asp:HyperLink>&nbsp;-
<asp:Label id=”lblRelevance” runat=”server” CssClass=”Normal” Text=’<%# FormatRelevance(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “Relevance”)) %>’ >
</asp:Label><BR>
<asp:Label id=”lblSummary” runat=”server” CssClass=”Normal” Text=’<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “Description”) + “<br>” %>’ Visible=”<%# ShowDescription() %>”>
</asp:Label>
<asp:HyperLink id=”lnkLink” runat=”server” CssClass=”CommandButton” NavigateUrl=’<%# FormatURL(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”TabId”),
DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”Guid”)) %>’ Text=’<%# FormatURL(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”TabId”),
DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”Guid”)) %>’>
</asp:HyperLink>&nbsp;-
<asp:Label id=”lblPubDate” runat=”server” CssClass=”Normal” Text=’<%# FormatDate(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “PubDate”)) %>’>
</asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateColumn>
</Columns>
<PagerStyle CssClass=”NormalBold” Mode=”NumericPages”></PagerStyle>
</asp:Datagrid>

<div id=”NoResults”>
<h3 class=”red” style=”text-align:center”>No Search Results Found</h3>
</div>
<script language =”Javascript”>
var search;
search = document.getElementsByName(“result”);

if (search.length == 0) {
document.getElementById(“NoResults”).style.display=’block’;
}
else {
document.getElementById(“NoResults”).style.display=’none’;
}
</script>

Be sure to add the Name=”result” snippet to the asp:Hyperlink in the code above. It’s easy to miss.

Save that and you should now have a spiffy new message displayed when no results are found. Use whatever CSS you want to style the message.

The previous version I used to check IE6 used a Virtual PC and was a memory hog. This method worked perfectly and much faster and lets you test all the way back to Internet Explorer 3 (if you so desire).

First up is Local Analytics. This plugin caches the urchin.js file on your local server, allowing  faster loading of the script. It also adds an admin configurable host of options that allow better tracking of outgoing links, downloaded files, and email address links. Definitely worth a try if you like Google Analytics (and you should).

Next up is the WordPress Super Cache plugin. Heavily modifying the WP-Cache 2 plugin, Donncha O Caoimh has created another great plugin for WordPress. If you’ve got a lot of traffic and fairly static content, it might be just the thing you’re looking for. Comments suggest there might be issues with AJAX or other interactive features. So try it out and see how it works.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait on Super Cache. Despite a nice modification to use the plugin on a Windows IIS or Apache server, it still requires the ISAPI_Rewrite 3.0 package for use on Windows servers. With most of my work involving .NET development now and the site up and running fine on WordPress, maybe I should migrate to a PHP account?

After upgrading to WordPress 2.3 (fairly painless, despite the major changes due to “tag” implementation) I couldn’t upload images. Any image over 100K would produce an error stating: Allowed memory size of 16388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 6400 bytes). It also made reference to the includes\image.php file.

After reading the TechTracer post, I added one line of code just after the <? php tag in the image.php file:

ini_set(‘memory_limit’,’32M’);

The additional functions in WordPress (tags) and the plug-ins that I’m running must max out the memory. Now, I can upload my images and WordPress will resize and generate thumbnails just like it should (using the excellent Flexible Upload plug-in, that is).

Smashing Magazine also provided a list of 8 Usability Checkpoints as well. Just read the article for more info on each one listed below.

1. You don’t use pop-ups.
2. You don’t change users’ window size.
3. You don’t use too small font sizes.
4. You don’t have unclear link text.
5. You don’t have dead links.
6. You have at most one animation per page.
7. You make it easy to contact you.
8. Your links open in the same window.

The most notable change is the support for “tagging” posts. Similar to Flickr and other sites, posts will not have categories and can also be tagged with more general relationships. This addition changes the structure of the WP database and could possibly break some of you favorite WP plug-ins.

I’ve installed Release Candidate 1 on another site and the only casualty was the excellent Extended Live Archive plug-in. I doubt the problem will be fixed, since the plug-in has seen little activity. Maybe someone will come along with something similar for 2.3.