_Who Works for These Companies?

I am not saying I am the perfect employee or even one who never makes mistakes.  I make my share.  But I was in a situation the other day where I am working with a client on getting hosting set up for a new web site.  I provided a document of what type of access I will need.  User account for FTP, Shell access and file modification access to certain directories and read only access to others.  I also gave examples of .conf files for apache of what I will need.

I get an email back from the hosting company and they provide me all the info I need.  IP, Username and Password, file locations etc.  Wow.  Everything seems like it will work great.  Well, that was last Friday.  It was not until Monday when I was able to fully access the web site.  First FTP did not work.  SSH did not work either.  HTTP did not work as well.  Once they got FTP and SSH to work the document root was not set up correctly.  Once they figured that out, I installed my software and database did some testing and found out my .htaccess file is not working.  AllowOverride was not enabled (it was in my doc I sent).

So, in an effort to fix that they enabled Authentication on the site and I could not even view it.  Argh.  Finally done.  But now we need to set up production.

_Yet Another jQuery Lightbox

I have tried a ton of lightboxes.  Thickbox, Greybox, Lightbox, Facebox, Boxy..etc…  They all have their pluses and minuses but this one seems to combine all of the goodness of all lightboxes into one.

It is called prettyPhoto.  I have not used it yet but on my next dev project I sure will.

_Tech Challenge

This post got me thinking of creating a fun Tech Challenge for my team here at work.  Since we consist of Developers, QA and IA, I need to make it fair for all to enter.  I am allowing 4 categories:

Web

Mobile

Process

Content

Each of which can be fun.  They all need to have some bearing to the business that we are in or can help an internal need we may have.  Someone just can’t create a blog and enter it in (like Drew5.net).  Prizes will be awards..or I should just say “a” prize will be awarded.  Still working on the rules.  Look forward to the actaul announcement.

_Finally Got My Blog Going and Twitter Hooked Up

My blog has been down for some time now.  I was hosted with 1and1.com on a .NET platform using BlogEngine.NET.  It was pretty cool.  No real complaints but I work in .NET all day so I am pretty fluent with it.  There has been more buzz re: PHP and WordPress so for about a year now I have been playing with both.  What better way to gain skills in something then to try to use it almost every day.  So I moved from 1and1.com over to GoDaddy.com to save a little money and work in PHP more.

So far so good.  At some point I will load my old posts but no rush.  Now just integrating my Twitter with my blog.

_3 Days Later…

So I decided to upgrade my wordpress installation on my company intranet.  We were running an older version of WordPress MU (2.7..so I thought) and wanted to bump it up to the latest.

I read the instructions over and over and seemed pretty straightforward.  So I began.

Step 1. Tar up my site.  That took forever.

Step 2. Dump my db.  Did that.

Step 3. Script my db as well.  Glad I did that.

Step 4. Back up .htaccess and wp-config.php and copy over all files (not wp-content).

Everything was going well.  Checked permissions, files, db…all was in order.

Fire up my browser and nothing.  I looked at firebug and saw that i was getting a 500 error.  Checked the logs nothing out of the ordinary.

Did the following: login with the db user using phpmyadmin, mysql, changed password, created new user and nothing worked.  I then created a new db and copied tables over…nothing.  I then tried to start from scratch..kinda like a new install…nothing.  Still could not connect to DB.  CHMOD 777 everything.  Nothing.  Finally I downloaded another 2.8.4a version and uploaded the whole thing.  New installation with that went fine.

Argh.  Tried to change to old db, nothing.  So I manually copied over all the data into the new database.  Still doing it.  Also, my theme no longer works…that is Fridays job