I've been hosted with Blacknight for two years now and I'm very happy with the service.

Yesterday and today I was installing WordPress and bbPress on the same domain for a blog/forum solution. I was trying to set up seo friendly permalinks on bbPress all day yesterday with no success. Lots of people have had problems with getting seo friendly permalinks set up on bbPress. I could have used another forum solution but I wanted a blog on the site too and nothing integrates with WordPress as well as bbPress. I contacted Blacknight's support at 11.52 this morning and Jonathan had the issue resolved by 11.59.

He checked the ftp error logs and highlighted the fact that the server did not support Multiviews

[Thu Jul 22 12:41:28 2010] [alert] [client 86.46.136.168] /usr/local/pem/vhosts/xxxxxx/webspace/httpdocs/forum/.htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here

I removed this from the bbPress .htaccess file and this fixed the problem immediately. So a 7 minute turn around time for something that I was trawling forums for all day yesterday. If you need a working .htacess file for bbPress for a blacknight hosted solution feel free to contact me and I'll send it on.

This isn't the first time I've dealt with Blacknight support. The last time I had problems with Wordpress .htaccess and Jonathan also helped me fix the issue.

So if you're looking for web hosting in Ireland, I would thoroughly recommend blacknight! Just wish I contacted them yesterday

I've wanted to switch this blog across from the current Windows hosting solution to my Linux hosting account for a while now. I thought this was going to be a nightmare but it went really smooth (i think) and took less than an hour. For anyone look to do the same here's what I did:

1. Backed up all my wordpress files currently saved on my windows hosting account. To do this I just FTP'd the entire root folder that included all of the wp-content themes and plugins as well as any image and resource files that I linked to.

2. Backed up the database stored on my windows server. To do this I followed the Wordpress Codex doc on Backing up your database. Really easy to follow. I downloaded the .sql file to my hard disc.

3. Switched my website hosting from Windows (IIS) server to Apache (Website) from within the control panel that links to both my Windows and Linux hosting packages. The switch took about 5 minutes. This left with with a blank webspace on my linux server.

4. Uploaded the latest version of Wordpress (2.9.2) to my linux web space.

5. Set up a new database on the linux server.

6. Edited wp-config.php in the root of my Wordpress installation to point to the new database settings and also uploaded a .htaccess file to the root of my wordpress installation.

7. Used the Famous 5 minute install from Wordpress to install Wordpress on my Linux webspace. I then had a blank installation of Wordpress with the default Kubrick theme.

8. I uploaded all the wp-content files (themes, plugins etc.) from step one into the new installation.

9. I then imported the original database that I downloaded in step 2 using the restoring your database guide from Wordpress Codex. I was slightly confused as to how this would work before I done it as I did not keep the same name and settings for the new database on the linux server. This didn't cause any problems though and it simply imports data into the new database from the old one.

That was it. Simple and a hundred times more painless than I thought. As far as I can see everything is working perfectly. I don't know if it will have any effect on rankings in Google but I wouldn't think so. All in all I would say the site was only down for about 10 to 15 minutes so I'd be a lot more confident about doing this next time. Hopefully I won't have to do it again though as my reason for switching is that my Windows hosting solution is due shortly and I am not going to renew it as it's easier to have everything stored on Linux.

That's all for now...

Update : 6th of April 2010 : I had said that the switch was seemless but I did notice a problem with the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files associated with the all in one Seo plugin for Wordpress. Any new posts such as this one were not being written to the sitemap files. I corrected this by CHMODing the files to make them writeable.

I made a to do list at the start of this week and here's a progress report:

photo credit: nocas

Earlier in the week I created a to do list for stuff I wanted/needed to get done this week.

One of the things on the agenda was to make a list of things that I wanted to change on the appearance of this blog, here goes:
1. There's a colour mismatch in the div at the top of my page, I need to changed the page background image to match this or vice versa.

2. New Logo: I want to restyle the logo so that it's more readable, my domain name is pretty long but I like it and I'm sticking with it. Based on feedback, I might run it over two lines and may do something with the colours also.
3. Give myself a bit of a makeover. I look like Al Pacino in Scarface and want to just fix up the dark line running down the side of my cheek bone. Yes, I agree this is vain.
4. I'm still using the post title and text styles that come with the custom wordpress theme,. I'd like to have a look at some other styles to put my own spin on the look of my posts. This isn't that important, but I just want to move towards a completely customised look and feel for my site.
5. Need to rework the current ad for RudeVid.com. I threw this together in 2 minutes and I want to update it and create a uniform style for all future ads for site I'm involved with from now on. RudeVid.com was another thing on the agenda and I've been making some solid progress on this too!
6. I generally want to restyle the entire sidebar and give it a look that integrates better with the design of the rest of the site. In addition to this, I'd like to add a few more plugins to increase the functionality of the site. I could just go ahead and install every plugin available but it's important for me to do a bit of research into this area and make sure I select plugins that fit in with this site and increase the usability.

7. Restyle the bullet points used for listed items. I've started using lists on my posts recently as I feel it makes things easier to read for certain topics. Again I want to add my own look and feel to this area and will design my own images for this.
8. I added the SocioFluid Plugin a while back and I may look at other options for this. I want to cut down the number of social bookmarking links I'm using on this site and will either reduce the ones currently listed with the SocioFluid plugin or may look at another plugin altogether.
9. Again, more restyling on the links back to previous/next posts, what I have is ok but again I just want to customise the look and feel my own taste.
10. Last but not least, I 'might' rework the graphics styling on the footer or left align the footer text.
11. - Update: Move this blog across to a linux server, I purchased a linux hosting package a while back to eliminate the index php from my permalink structure. I also think linux is better for open source software such as WordPress.

As you can see, these are mainly all cosmetic css or design fixes, but they are important for me as for each one that I style myself it's me putting my own personal touch on my site. The great thing about WordPress and indeed css is the adaptability. The stuff on my site doesn't look the way I want it to right now but when I make these changes in the right places the whole site gets an overhaul and everything looks the way I want it to and not just the stuff I add after making the changes. I'm hoping to roll out these changes before the end of the Summer. I've taken the first step now anyway and I'm a lot better organised for getting this done with minimal effort. It's only a matter of pulling up this post as a reference and getting stuck into Photoshop and the backend of this site for a few hours to make these changes happen.

I haven't rejected the other stuff on the list, I'll be following up later in the week with another post on my progress

Here's my checklist/ to do list for the week to ensure things get done:

photo credit: Great Beyond