Rice Blogger

I would like to thank my loyal reader and my visitor to RiceBlogger for a great year. Wishing a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to everyone out there. Enjoy the festive season with your friends and family. Another year goes, and hopefully 2009 will be a good year for us, bloggers.

This blog is only 1 year and 3 months old and I think that it is doing great so far and Wordpress keeps getting better, especially 2.7.

To summarize the activities:-

• I had 192 posts for the year 2008
• about 700 comments and some trackbacks
• Earning me sufficient to maintain this blog and getting my Google checks

The easiest way to upgrade your wordpress in minutes is through SSH. With the latest release of Wordpress 2.7, you could try to upgrade your wordpress in this method. In most of the share hosting including hostgator (my hosting company), it does include SSH but it is not activated. Therefore you will have to request from them that SSH be activated and they will provide you with a telnet ip (others will be telnet to your domain).

You could use puTTy or you can use your default windows telnet by

• start > run
• telnet 182.xxx.xxx.xxx 2222 (your ip or the domain here & 2222 is the port if requires)

After telnet, you will have to do the following. ** Remember to make a backup of your files before doing update)

1. Login via SSH to your host
2. Go to a your domain directory. (most probably type: cd public_html)

3. Grab the latest WP archive (type: wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz)
4. Extract the archive contents (type: tar xzf latest.tar.gz)
5. You will see a new directory called wordpress (type: ls -l)
6. Delete wp-includes and wp-admin directories (type: rm -rf wp-includes/) (type:rm -rf wp-admin/)
7. Goto the new wordpress directory (type: cd wordpress)
8. Update your default wordpress theme and plugin (type: cp -R wp-content/themes/* ../wp-content/themes/) (type: cp -R wp-content/plugins/* ../wp-content/plugins/)
9. Delete wp-content directory (type: rm -rf wp-content/)
10. Copy all latest version of wordpress files and directories and overite your current wordpress (type:cp -R * ../)
11. Deleting the downloaded files (type: cd ..) (type: rm -rf ./wordpress/) (type: rm -f latest.tar.gz)

Careful while using telnet because command like rm-r or rm-rf will delete your folder and files without any warning and there is no way of getting them back. Backup is important and makesure you are at the right directory. Check directory by using the command (type: SSH)

Use this tutorial at your own risk, remember to backup your files before doing and upgrade and deleting.

Pownce is one of the pioneer in Microblogging together with Twitter and Jaiku. Unfortunately they are no longer in business. I am guessing because a lot of people actually uses twitter. I am one that is different because I have always prefer other interfaces such as Pownce and Jaiku, then comes Plurk. I somehow like plurk interface but I am not a big time microblogger.

It is sad to see one of my account going away because I had friends there. I guess it has to go because they are not profitting and I am also seeing more and more people registering an account and getting thousands of friends then link back to their spammy homepage.

If you go to Pownce, you will see this:-

Bye Bye Pownce!

If you need more than 140 characters to express your feeling at twitter, you can try this service, TwitBlogs. Basically it keeps the post on their homepage and post the title with a short link on your Twitter profile. It is like having your own blog (but this is using their blog services) with the use of Twitfeed.

Here is how it looks like on my test post to my twitter account.

Try TwitBlogs

I have a new website that is running on Pligg. Pligg is a great digg clone software but there is some problem with the content management system. Therefore it is very hard to manage users and content. My site is getting some traffic from all the SEO and promotion that I did, unfortunately I am currently facing problem with spams and it is getting out of control.

Control of user and content
It is very hard to control because there is no mass user management panel whereby you can delete or ban any user. The interface is slow if you were to delete / killspam one user by a time. This goes the same with posting of content. Although there is mass disabling but it is still slow when you get 200 spam post.

Bugs
I think there is still a lot of bugs in their javascript whereby some click on the username actually does not work for me.

Deleting from MySQL
Deleting from MySQL also poses a problem when the user deleted have a post, therefore both content and user have to be deleted form MySql. I did that for the 200 spam that I receives, hopefully it does not poses any problem in the later state.

Email Verification
I believe that it is really missing this function. Email verification is quite important to prevent spammer from posting. Hopefully the upcoming pligg version 10.0.0 will fix all this problem.

Upgrades
I did upgrade once and the template was totally gone therefore everything have to be done all over again. They should try to fix this as well.

Alternative
I am now considering Drigg, if anyone have any experience. It seems to be solid because it is actually running on drupal.