zerolight

When I started developing the little Joomla modules to hook into the jd_wordpress and mojoBlog Joomla components, I figured some folk out there might appreciate them too. To find that some of these modules have exceeded 1300 downloads in the past few months comes as a pleasant surprise.

I just switched from my previous host when it became apparent that they didn’t know what they were doing. Shame as they were very cheap. Basically, thought they said they supported PHP, but it turned out only really PHP installed via cPanel which was owned by user “nobody”, the server. Anything I uploaded myself could not access the file as system my PHP scripts run under my user had no file permissions. Their solution was to change the file permissions on my site to 777… letting every hacker, their dog, and even the village idiot, have free access to my domain. Nice one. I canceled my account on the spot… good job I was on a monthly plan.

The transition to Lunar Pages was easy, it’s also clear that they are very professional, know what they are doing, and have a massive and loyal user base. Support forums are a nice touch, and it’s nice to have a free 0800 number in the UK for a USA based hosting firm.

From my end, moving my website and email over took minutes, unfortunately, getting my JD-WordPress/OpenWP component in Joomla to function (such that I could edit and create posts) on the new host wasn’t so easy and swallowed up a couple of hours – sorry Z. In the end I got it working by re-ftp’ing the component onto my site (so I assume some permissions got mangled first time around or something). Which tool minutes… go figure!

Today (and a little bit of last night) I worked on somebody elses website. The site of somebody in the USA who’s been mailing me for help over the past few weeks / months. I transformed his site with a heavily modified version of a free template from rockettheme. Looks pretty good now. The layout of the content could do with a little bit of work, I reckon JD-WordPress, my Joomla blog of choice, would help here.

Some random, and totally untraceable error occured with my WordPress install. The admin page was inaccessible, and thus I was also unable to submit posts. All the configuration information is stored in a database, yet I was able to backup that database, re-install WordPress, and restore the database, to find everything working again. In theory, it’s in exactly the same state it was when it was fubared. Most bizarre. It’s working now which I guess is the main thing.

I’ve added tagging functionality to my blog. It required surprisingly little in the way of hacks to get Ultimate Tag Warrior to work with JD-WordPress. It was originally intended to work with the original WordPress. Now, if you click on a post, in addition to a list of comments, you’ll also get a list of the 5 most recent posts related to the one you’re currently reading.