Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7, and yes, it’s as good as they said it would be.  The new interface is looks better, is more convenient, and even feels faster.  Things are somehow closer to where they should be and overall it makes more sense.  However, I am yet to test it on a few non-technical bloggers who I help with blog hosting and administration.

The upgrade itself was fast and painless as usual - just overwrite the old files with new, visit administration, and click on a button to upgrade the database structure when asked so.  That’s it.  I’ve also scrolled through the Settings section just to see what’s new (a few things are), and that’s about it.

I’ve noticed that there are a few glitches here and there, most of which are related to plugins that I am using.  Hopefully I’ll sort them out soon.  In the worst case scenario, they will be taken care of in the new design that is in the works for this blog.

None of the sites hosted on my sever were accessible for most of yesterday.  That was caused by some emergency maintenace done by the hosting company.  They didn’t warn me before, so I weren’t aware of it coming and for how long it would last.

This is the third downtime for this month.  Needless to say, I am not satisfied with the service no more.  Firstly, the downtimes are too frequent and too lengthy.  Secondly, total absense of notificatios - either before the downtime or after.  No explanations.  Nothing.

I’ve been with this hosting company for more than two years now and it was OK most of the time.  But now, once again, I am thinking about moving somewhere else.   Suggestions?

Comments and a few other things are broken right now. I am aware of the problem and working to solve it.  Thank you all for letting me know.  I’ll post an update here once the issue is resolved.

Update: comments are fixed.  It looks like it was a misconfiguration on the part of the hosting company (incorrect permissions for sessions directory).

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so - Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!

It appears that this blog has been recently compromised.  Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know.  Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice - one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.

I am still looking into when and how this happened.  The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update).  I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions.  I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).

If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.