SeanColombo.com

After upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, the text of all of the categories were deleted. It appears this may be my fault for not disabling all of the plugins before doing the upgrade (oops). They’re back now though. It was somewhat annoying to have to do, but as far as “data loss error”s go, it wasn’t very bad at all.

I noticed a bunch of other people online had similar problems but nobody mentioned a solution so I figured I might as well throw up a quick description of what I did.

I used google to find a cached version of my page which listed all of the categories in the side-bar. Now I had all of the categories but I didn’t know which id in the database matched which category. I found that out by running this query:
SELECT post_title, term_taxonomy_id FROM wp_posts,wp_term_relationships WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id=wp_posts.ID ORDER BY term_taxonomy_id;
Which shows what posts were assigned to each category. After reading through the list and figuring it out, I was able to fix the text by typing queries along the lines of:
UPDATE wp_terms SET name='Motive Force', slug='motive-force' WHERE term_id=8;

Since I brushed over it above:
To find a cached version of your site on google, just search for “site:YOURDOMAINNAMEHERE.com”, then click on “Cached” next to any of the results. They clear those out after a while, so don’t put it off!

entry posted to:

I have several blogs, all with different topics. One of the reasons I haven’t been updating them enough to meet my satisfaction is that there is some overlap in the subject-matter, and I am often confused on where to post to.

I decided recently that I should start burning through my list of articles to write, and to help this along, I wrote a cross-blog posting system. It\’s pretty nifty because it posts to a WordPress v1.5, WordPress v2.0.3, and my own custom blogging system that I wrote for Codeaholics.

My personal site will generally serve as the aggregator and (probably) get every article, along with links out to each of the blogs where the article was posted.

Here is a breakdown of the different blogs and what they cover:

• SeanColombo.com - the aggregate of all posts. This is my life as a whole, so it will have every article, and will have little icons indicating which blogs the article was posted to.
• Motive Blog - productivity and the glory of man! Basically this blog will exhalt all the things that Motive Force LLC stands for, and pretty much ignore the rest.
• iHateCSS.org - general griping about numerous, poorly implemented web-languages/standards and tips on how to survive them. Since it’s made partially as an emotional outlet for the frustrations of coders who have been portability-hacking their code for hours, the tone is fairly informal.
• Codeaholics Code blog- programming / hacking / general caffeination.
• Codeaholics News - where the code-blog is less-pinnacle code-related stuff, the News blog is just for announcements (eg: when coding projects get started/released, etc.).

Permanent hosting! SeanColombo.com and Codeaholics.com have been live and dead repeatedly over the last several years since they were always running off of my desktop computer. Every time I relocated, they would go down for a while. In fact, they have been down for a couple weeks, and last summer they were down the whole time.

Justification (skip this paragraph if you’re bored already)
They’re pretty decent sites (in my humble opinion), and Codeaholics even gets some sweet page-rank when it stays up for a while, so I decided to make them a little more permanent. Since one is about my code (which relates to Motive Force projects) and one is about my life (which is about 90% related to Motive Force), I moved the sites over to my Motive Force web-hosting account. There are no additional fees to host additional domains (because DreamHost is sweet like that), so I think hosting these sites just for the promotion they give is a legitimate use of the company web-space.

Anyway, with those sites back up, I’ve decided I’m going to try to start blogging on a regular schedule. I have a lot of cool things to tell the world (don’t worry, they generally won’t be about my life, they will be legitimate articles!) and I wrote them down in my Projectory so I could come back to them later. When people read a blog, it can be frustrating to have a bunch of topics coming through their feed, so I’m going to be writing a tool that lets me post to certain blogs and not to others. Here is the breakdown:

• SeanColombo.com - the aggregate of all posts. This is my life as a whole, so it will have every article, and will have little icons indicating which blogs the article was posted to.
• Motive Blog - productivity and the glory of man! Basically this blog will exhalt all the things that Motive Force LLC stands for, and pretty much ignore the rest.
• Codeaholics.com - programming / hacking / general caffeination.
• iHateCSS.org - general griping about numerous, poorly implemented web-languages/standards and tips on how to survive them. Since it’s made partially as an emotional outlet for the frustrations of coders who have been portability-hacking their code for hours, the tone is fairly informal.

Just added another plugin (for those who are interested in installing/updating wordpress). It’s called BAStats and keeps track of the traffic on your WordPress blog. It had a bunch of problems originally, but most of them seem to be fixed. The only bug that I found just required me to go to the options tab of the WP-admin page and “Update Options” (oddly, I have to check at least one of the “Track traffic to …” boxes).

You can find it here:
http://asymptomatic.net/wp/2005/02/15/1309/bastats-pre-release/

I noticed that the links for the tags (to view all posts with the same tag) weren’t working. So after a while of messing around trying to install/activate mod_rewrite on my Apache server, I gave up (because I think you must need to have it active when you install WP originally?). Anywho… I just hacked up Ultimate Tag Warrior to work without the mod_rewrite (just uses the URI like every other page now). Then I customized it a little more to my current theme, and I noticed that the Popular tags on the right side of the screen were not counting above 1. This is just an error in Ultimate Tag Warrior.

If you have a similar problem, go to the file “wp-content/plugins/ultimate-tag-warrior.php” and look at the function that starts:
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I just grabbed this domain (didn’t want someone else to steal it and try to resell it), and I have it for a decade! This makes me very happy.

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