Developing For .NET

Howdy Reader,

I have made a few updates to the site.  Nothing big, but I wanted to go ahead and log them as a point of reference.

Issues

I’ve been having an issue recently with my MySQL server. It appears that on occasion it will shut down access because of too many failed login attempts.  Of course, it makes me wonder who or what is causing the problem, but for now I just have to catch it and clear the hosts file to reset it. 

Unfortunately, when it is happening the site is completely unavailable.  If you see the site having trouble in the future, like a database connection isn’t working, please DM or @ me on Twitter and I’ll fix it.

I’ve also been having some connection issues with Akismet. The plug-in is reporting that 2 of the servers will connect but 2 others won’t.  See updates below for more…

Updates

I updated today to WordPress 2.8.2.  The update seemed to hang for a log time on a blank screen, something that has not been an issue in previous updates.  I was getting nervous for a while but it finally flashed up and appears to have completed normally.

I found the WP-SpamFree plugin, which promises to eliminate Comment Spam.  Akismet has been doing fine, but I still have to moderate a few everyday.  We’ll see if this new plug-in fares any better.

On the same note, the plug-in also includes a spam free Contact page.  I’ve enabled it, so if you wish to send contact me through the site, go to the Contact Me page (listed on the right under ‘Pages’).

So I noticed in my BlogLines page that the Feed for DevelopingFor was no longer showing. I guess after so long of being unavailable it automatically deleted it. So I clicked on the RSS Feed to subscribe, and lo-and-behold, the missing articles showed up! These were the articles that were written after the last backup, and a couple of good ones to boot.

So I am going to copy and paste them to repost. I cannot guarantee the quality as they are not entered properly through WordPress, but at least the general content should be recovered… if nothing else, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Posts marked with [REPOST] are ones that were done in this fashion. If anyone has linked to any of them, I’m sure the links will fail, but I may be able to recapture those thanks to WP 2.5′s Permalink editor. It will also take a little while to get all the categories straightened out, but overall I am very happy. Who knew?

[UPDATE] Amazing! Bloglines retained the entire HTML, so all the source code samples and all formatting was recaptured by simply copying it from their online feed!

[UPDATE 2] I was able to get all the old post permalinks reset, and I just wanted to share how to do it in case any of you find yourselves in this strange situation. Here are the steps (for each post):

1. After creating the post and copy and pasting the contents, save the post (since this is the most important step we want to make sure it gets done)
2. Go to the Bloglines feed and look at the link – this will tell you what the original Category was. Now go edit the Category on the post and Save the post.
3. Click the Edit link next to the Permalink. Paste the link in from Bloglines. Remove the parts of the link up to and including the category and the “.html” suffix.
4. Now, in order for this to take, you must press “Save” again!

And Viola, restored Permalinks.

You may have experienced an odd occurrence on the site today, and if so I apologize. For some inexplicable reason, the site encountered the dreaded WordPress Blank Page issue. Last I checked, which I think was yesterday afternoon, the site loaded just fine. Today, however, I noticed that the front page would not load. The index.php page produced only a blank return: a completely empty HTML document. Then I confirmed that the Admin page would load correctly.

I checked and even restarted the web server: all was well and restarting did not help, which I expected since all the other sites seemed fine. Next, I deactivated all the plugins, but since that made no difference I reactivated them immediately. I then tried reloading 2.5, but that did not change anything. Finally, I went to the admin page and changed the Theme to the WordPress Default. All of a sudden, the site showed up. I changed back to the regular site theme, and sure enough it would not load. Fortunately, I keep a copy of the Theme on my PC, so I uploaded it again and the site came back.

After going through this, I think I’ve done this once before. Maybe next time I’ll remember the solution without all the gyrations. Of course, it would be nice to not have the problem ever again. I expect to potentially have this sort of problem immediately following an update, but since it has been a couple of weeks since upgrading to 2.5 I really don’t understand the sudden problem.

This morning I the site upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and I am very impressed! I know it is not .Net, but I think there are plenty of you who might be interested. So here is my list of top 7 cool new WP features:

1. Permalink editing: you can now preview and edit the Permalink of a blog post. Previously, it was always based on the title, which can be annoying and not always SEO friendly.
2. Improved Dashboard: a better layout, more relevant information, easier navigation.
3. “Top Post” information added to the Dashboard.
4. The WordPress Blog feed has been downsized and moved.
5. A Plugin feed has been added to the Dashboard.
6. Integrated Stats (may require Stats plug-in) on the Dashboard.
7. Improved WYSIWYG editor and interface.

They say that the new interface no longer messes with your code in posts, but we’ll see the next time I post some samples. They also say you are supposed to be able to configure the Dashboard yourself, but I haven’t found that feature yet.

I will say they made a couple of changes I don’t care for, mostly on the “Write Post” screen. They moved most of the advanced features below the post instead of in the right hand sidebar, so even to select a Category I have to scroll down now (which was not previously the case). I’m not sure what the benefit is: the right sidebar is still present, so there is no increased posting space, you simply have fewer options in the sidebar. Actually, it makes the page seem a little lopsided. For most of the features this is not an issue, but selecting a category is pretty important and should have been left where it was.

But I’m nitpicking. Otherwise it looks as though the team at WP has done another fantastic job.