Shane Life

I’ve been having some Wordpress/GoDaddy issues on the administration side of this site. If you’ve submitted a comment previously and it has been slow to be approved, I have now remedied the situation. I was not receiving notifications of comments (for some weird reason that I still don’t understand). As far as I can tell, it boiled down to the php_mailer function in Wordpress not being supported by GoDaddy hosting, at least in this release.

I found a fantastic plugin that sends notification e-mails using SMTP instead of PHPMail.

Sweet.

Don’t forget about my pledge to not eat red meat. Help me buy a cow from Heifer International.

I think I am.

I have finally figured out what was wrong with my site.

(For those of you who do not understand, I’ll explain as best I can…for those who don’t care about technobabbly gobbldy-gook, feel free to not read…I won’t be offended, I promise).

OK, so I recently switched hosts from TextDrive to GoDaddy. There were a couple reasons why:

1. GoDaddy allows me to host unlimited domains
2. Price…GoDaddy is about half the price per month
3. I can manage everything in one place now, domains, hosting…the whole shebang.
4. Plus, GoDaddy’s support is very very good.

(This is not an incrimination of TextDrive. Their servers did, however, tend to be a little slow and SQL would occasional go down, but overall, they were pretty good.)

To backup everything required some serious learning on my part. I had no idea how SQL worked…all I knew was it was the database structure for all my data on my blog (and Jakes, but that’s beside the point). I figured out how to export all of my MySQL tables from TextDrive, backup all my presentation files, and move it all over.

Then came the hard part.

I quickly realized that one of the nice things about TextDrive is that they stay pretty current with the latest PHP, SQL, etc. languages. However, for a hosting behemoth like GoDaddy, they have to work with the lowest common denominator. So my SQL tables that were exported from TextDrive did not magically import into phpMyAdmin on GoDaddy’s servers like they were supposed to. I talked for a while on the phone with GoDaddy’s support and they were extremely helpful. I searched the internet and found countless workarounds, but I couldn’t get them to work for some reason.

Then I finally got the tables to import. I found a way to export my SQL tables from TextDrive into a format that earlier versions of mySQL would understand. This was a couple days ago. Then, when I went to post (I have a couple movie reviews to list…one on Little Miss Sunshine, one on Talledega Nights) and I got this:

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '0' for key 1]
INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’0′,’_pingme’,'1′)

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '0' for key 1]
INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’0′,’_encloseme’,'1′)

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in /wp-admin/post.php on line 60

Crap.

After some serious searching, I found the answer in the place I should have looked first, the glorious support forums of Wordpress. All I had to do was go into phpMyAdmin and edit the primary ID values of all my tables in my database to be set to “auto_increment”. Oh, is that all? Once I did that, everything began to work.
All is right with the world again.