Shane Life

OK, so I heard something that bummed me out. The current design of this site does not work in IE 7. BLECH.

So, I’m going to be doing some tweaking. Bear with me. I doubt it will be anytime soon before I jump into creating an actual theme like the one in my previous post, but we’ll see.

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.

OK, so I was all set to get my blog moved over to a more lightweight theme, considering modding the Indigo theme by Kaushal Sheth. I got it working, but there was something wacky going on with the sidebar widgets and I didn’t really want to mess with all the work of trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but I have yet to find a theme that works better than K2.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).

So I think that I get tired with blog designs easily because I am starting to tire of the all orange action that I’ve got going on here. I like it, but not TOO much. I sense a redesign coming in the future, but I’m likely still going to incorporate the random movie quotes into the header (aren’t those sweet?).

I want some user interaction for my next design and I also want to know what content you prefer on the old bloggy blog.

First question: What should be the predominant color on my new blog design?

1. Blue
2. Red
3. Green
4. Black
5. Other

Second question: Is there content that does not exist that you would like to see, or content that you would like to see more or less of?

Third question: Would you like to see me add a movie review sidebar? (I found a sweet plugin that will allow me to do really quick, on-the-fly movie reviews.)

So…it’s up to you…

I’m testing something with my feed. Bear with me.

OK, so I’m going to try running my feeds through feedburner so I can get better metrics on how many people are signed up for my feed, etc. Anyway…I’m hoping that nothing changes for you in your feed readers…let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve decided that my little experiment in shortening titles was a big pain. So I’m abandoning it.

Longer, more descriptive titles ahead.

P.S. I want to apologize for my site’s intermittent outage (as well as Jake’s site). My host, TextDrive, has been having MySQL outage issues with my server. So here’s the deal…I’m planning on switching hosts (AGAIN!) when our contract is up. I’m definitely going to rock Dreamhost…likely the best, most comprehensive hosting programs available.

I’m messing with the style of my site…sorry for the boring-ness right now. Give it time. It will be totally sweet. I’m going to go with a variation on danish designer Joen Asmussen’s theme Fauna.

Stupid Internet Explorer.

Why can’t all the browsers just get along?

Is it really necessary for them to pick and choose just how they want to display CSS Markup? Why?

IE is the biggest offender of them all. Which is why I use Firefox. And Safari at home.

iPaska is evil.

We will no longer be hosting alliarnoldart.com or topfivedesign.com at iPaska. Apparently, they are run by an evil man who is now being investigated for tax evasion. Plus, the sites have been down for 2 days (NOT ACCEPTABLE). We have officially switched over to TextDrive and I am pretty excited about it. Not only is our plan comprehensive, but it also supports some of the most highly regarded web developers out there.

TextDrive was created by the guy who developed TextPattern, a commonly used CMS. Many other members of the company are considered the web’s elite, including the developers of such projects as Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, and Basecamp.

I’m excited about the new host (although I’m a little bummed about the whole “out more money than I should be” thing) and I will keep everyone updated when I get up and running.