Blogger Template Designer - bug!

This is a chime-in for the issue reported by LenFeldman sometime last April. I recently started modifying my blogs after some time-off and noticed that Google Analytics suddenly flat-lined after updating to a newer template/theme. It seems all the code got lost during the process. That means, like him, I've lost months of tracking reports :-(

I've put the codes back manually with help from eBlog and will be monitoring my sites this week. Hopefully everything goes back as well as the new site going live successfully.

QNAP: WordPress Themes Not Displaying Error

So far I have been successful in exporting and importing my Blogger/Blogspot content to WordPress self-hosted. The nice thing to note is that this functionality is now built-in to WordPress and it will work after the initial authentication. After which I used the Category to Tags Coverter plugin which nicely sorted through the various import mismatch. Voila!

There is however one nasty issue. Although my newly converted Blogger-to-WordPress blog displays correctly in my internal network the view from the outside looking-in (external viewers) is largely flawed, to say the least. The WordPress themes, no matter what I change them to, are broken!

I found out the hard way and ticking off several theories.

1. Theme error?

I switched to the most basic theme and to my preferred ones, no game.

2. WordPress file and folder permissions?

Not sure what was up I re-installed several times and even updated to the latest 3.0.1 (which is another horror story altogether for another time). Still no juice, but that doesn't mean it isn't a particular file/folder permission setting.

3. Apache webserver and .htaccess rules?

I disabled, commented-out, deleted, created several .htaccess files in various folders but to no avail. It could be a general error under the main rules file that prevents serving images under the WordPress subfolder and yet why does it allow images on my phpBB and Joomla sites?

This is a mystery that needs to be solved and damn if I don't figure it out, soon.

For now I'm going through the official WordPress Codex notes on changing file permissions.

Update: 2010/November/22 @ 1:09AM

After ranting to my friends over dinner and swearing to move onto Joomla!, I simmered down and re-forwarded all my domains back to BlogSpot temporarily. After which I re-read the Codex and read through changing the site URL portion. The shortest path for me without messing with too many entries was to use the Relocate method, and it works. Eureka!

Here is how to do it:

1. Switch to editing mode (or followed the first 3 steps from my previous post)

2. Edit the wp-config.php file

3. Go to the end of the file and add the new temporary line:

define('RELOCATE',true);

4. Open your browser to your apparently-broken-to-external-wordpress-page and log-in:

ex. http://my-broken-wordpress-page.com/wordpress/wp-login.php

5. Log-in as normal

Since the RELOCATE flag set to true, your siteurl (General Settings -> WordPress address) will be auto-magically updated to whatever path you used to access the log-in screen. This will generally get the admin section functional but will not necessarily fix all the sections of your setup. You'll have to go through the rest of the blog and comb through the kinks if you find them. For now, my external viewers can now see this blog in its intended glory. Hooah!

Security tip:
Remove the added line once you get your site up and running. Leaving it there may break it (or leave your WordPress blog open to one).

QNAP: Apache and Needed Information

So you're setting up various things like your WordPress or perhaps messing around with some internals based on tips you get across the web. You type them in then doesn't work and says you have invalid or the wrong user permissions. What gives?

Don't forget you are working on a semi-embedded environment and not all things follow what is on Apache spec all the time. So how do you find out more about your installation without having to be able to read all these script lines? Let the installed system work for you of course. Everything is working on the basic that means you just need to know what the settings are.

First things first, get your tools and be where you should:

Step #1: Download WinSCP (or if you're further advanced feel free to use ssh).

Step #2: Log-in to the NAS as admin

Using username "admin".

Step #3: Change directories to Qweb

[~] # cd /share/Qweb/

You are now at the root of your web server, you have the following options:

Step #4a: To find out what user your instance (Apache default is httpd) is running as (QNAP default is httpdusr), create a temporary file, mine is called phpinfo1.php, and it only contains one line:

Step #4b: To dump all that is known from the system, create a temporary file, mine is called phpinfo2.php, and it only contains one line:

Step #5: Whatever your choice is from either of the last two-(2) steps above, open a browser instance and run the relative PHP file.

http://(your-ip-address)/phpinfo1.php
http://(your-ip-address)/phpinfo2.php

Security tip:

Once you are done with the scripts above, DELETE them. You risk divulging critical information about your installation if you leave these files lying around.

QNAP: WordPress and Connection Information

Newbie users like me will probably be stumped when faced with this ftp log-in screen when trying to update/upgrade/patch WordPress and/or plugins. You can attempt to guess and enter your details but there's a fair chance the whole process will fail midway through the next steps. Why? What to do?

Chris was quite helpful to get me on the right path. I have outlined the steps below for us QNAP users:

Step #1: Download WinSCP (or if you're further advanced feel free to use ssh).

Step #2: Log-in to the NAS as admin

Using username "admin".

Step #3: Change directories to wordpress

[~] # cd /share/Qweb/wordpress/

Step #4: Change the file permissions of the current folder and sub-folder contents

[/share/Qweb/wordpress] # chown -R httpdusr:administrators ./

Step #5: Exit the console

[/share/Qweb/wordpress] # exit

Step #6: Open your browser, get back to your WordPress admin console

http://(your-ip-address)/wp-login.php

Step #7: Pour yourself a nice beverage

Step #8: Enjoy!

As soon as you're done, make sure to start updating everything.

Security tip: Outdated WordPress installations and plugins are bad.

Blog Confusion: How to convert and import from Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal

As I'm testing and developing the QNAP WordPress installation for production, I wondered if there was a way to import from my pages on Blogger/Blogspot. After more than twenty-(20) open tabs I gave up on it for a while and let the idea stew -- threw myself at figuring out Joomla! in the meantime.

A few minutes ago while thinking of how to import the blog instead to Joomla! or how to integrate WordPress in the the framework I stumbled across this post on how Google has nicely provided some conversion tools *awesome!*

These are current services available:
http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/
http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/

All you have to do is to export your Blogger/Blogspot blog in an XML and feed this into the converter for processing - then done!

A note of caution though, I tried using Mac Safari on them and it didn't work. Pefectly working however on Windows XP, which was what I did before uploading to a network share and finishing off with the Mac.

Now my next project, how to split the QNAP WordPress into more than one-(1) blog to accomodate both this and my personal blog. Better yet if one of the Joomla! developers release a free version of the WordPress integration tool. *sigh*

QNAP: Joomla! and Wordpress - Installation Errors

I've finally figured out the problem causing the installation failure of extensions, write permissions on the folders under /share/Qweb/Joomla/

It makes sense, if you can't write to it then you can't damn well install it. If only the installation would take care of those issues automatically, eh?

Make sure to issue chmod 777 (that's read and writer permissions) for the ff: folders:
/share/Qweb/Joomla
/share/Qweb/wordpress

In fact the JoomlaHack Tip #3 mentions having to change file and folder permissions. Earlier in 2007 and later in 2008 there are several posts from QNAPAndy that mention this needs to be done for everything under the /share/Qweb subfolder.

I have recommended about the same for WordPress in this QNAP Forum thread.