iliveontheweb.com

Excellent support from Blacknight hosting

Enda — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:51:33 +0000

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

Proof that ideas come to life

Enda — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:02:55 +0000

Last year I posted some ideas for domain names on my domain page. One of these was mywebwill.com, I was just checking suitable domain names for some of the ideas from i want ideas.com and came upon this one for the idea of transferring all of your usernames and passwords for your online accounts to someone after you die. mywebwill.com was registered on the 7th of September 2009 and the idea and website have since come to life. Here's a summary of the service from the site itself:

My Webwill is a secure online service that allows you to make decisions about your Internet accounts after your death. The majority of sites we use on a daily basis are password protected – as a result there is no way for your loved ones to access your immaterial assets. For the people being left behind, the process of accessing sites and blogs is difficult and often impossible. Moreover, would they know what you wanted?

We have created My Webwill so that you can take control of your immaterial assets, even in the afterlife.

and a youtube video from founders Lisa Granberg and Elin Tybring explaining how the service works.

This is proof that ideas will come to life with a bit of though and some hard work. Why not check out iwantideas.com tosee if there's any ideas that you can bring to life!

Republished old posts

Enda — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:38:52 +0000

Yesterday I declared my blog reopen for blogness and today I republished all of my old posts. Last year I removed a lot of posts as I wanted to depersonalise my blog. I decided to put them back today for 2 reasons:
A. To restore any broken links on the site
B. To see how much extra traffic I pull in through the extra posts

photo credit: ShironekoEuro

The traffic on this blog was growing steadily last year until I stopped posting. Although I'm not too worried about traffic on here, it's just an experimental thing to see how many extra hits the site gets over the next month after fixing broken links and by re-publishing old content.

Reopen for blogness

Enda — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:40:32 +0000

I recently completed my PGCE in Secondary ICT and I am now a qualified teacher. Due to the commitments of the PGCE course, I didn't have time to commit to blogging over the last 10 months. I have however, spent some time blogging on theleavingcert.com (a site I partnered up on with Sean MacEntee last Summer). Recently myself and Sean purchased a second leaving cert related site (leaving-cert.net) so I'll be dedicating some time to both those sites over the Summer months.

photo credit: mag3737

I may also do a complete re-design on the theme for my blog if I get the time and relaunch some sites that I'm currently involved with. Hopefully I'll get back to a regular blogging schedule too, to keep all 3 of my readers happy

Seemless switch from Windows to Linux servers

Enda — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:55 +0000

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.