Finally I’ve done upgrading to WP 2.0. Loving the blue admin, post previews, ajex effects, import features and yes it’s fast.

Now, only thing left is to change new design I got no idea yet.

Technorati Tags: WordPress2.0, Upgrade, Blogging

After many headaches, my very first blogger design has been accomplished for my blogspot site “Little Mayvelous Things“. There are a lot need fixing yet it’s up and running as planned.
The first impressions I’ve got from some reviewers (very unfavorable reviewers: my bro and sis), it’s was “Eeeuu PINK!”, “Too Childish”, “Very girlie”, “Too flowery”, etc etc…I was pretty disappointed that they didn’t like my design.
Nevertheless, my siblings are always too much pain in the … that I’m so use to ignoring them.
Anyway it took me the whole day and night to think of the layout, color, font and design as I never been good with designing.

I’m trying my hand on site designing and hope to design this main site when I have time. Blogger template is easier to redesign than wordpress cos’ blogger has only one file to think of where else WP involve lots of template files. Another reason I’m very slow in rework of mayvelous.com is that I have no php/mysql experience and never build a site using those. So cracking each WP theme templates line by line is very painful process especially when you’re not familiar with php coding.
Anyway now my first step of cracking blogger template has been done, there’ll be only sometime I manage to crack WP as well.
May be next year… will put that in my new year resolution.

So please do visit my newly redesigned site and review how you like or hate about it. Any help or suggestions regarding accessibility issues/errors are most welcome and will try to fix them as I can.
The design is still in progress with a few layout adjustment to made. Anyway I had a busy xmas weekend with that.
Hope you enjoy browsing “Little Mayvelous Things“.

Technorati Tags: redesign, template, theme, blogging, blogspot, sitereview

I just switched to FireFox 1.5 now(yah I know I’m late) and my “JustBlogIt” and “ScreenGrab” got screwed up so I’m testing this new “Performancing” extension. I’m useing that extension to post this entry.

I was really annoyed first cos’ I’ve just installed the extension and couldn’t find how to make use of it. I mean where in the name to click or set setting or post?

There is no option in the extensions panel to set the blog options and I can’t find any trace of how it works at all on “Performancing.com” site.
May be people are too smart or I’m too stupid that the site doesn’t provide a page explaining how to use it. Not even a single screen shot of things in action.

I took me 3 min to search through the site and I couldn’t find it so I search on my browser for any new icons. Finally I found it.
Boy I was like phheeewwww!! What a place to let people notice.

Ok now the good part about it. I really love the interface, it’s just within your browser and no pop up or new windows. Whichever tabs you switch it’s there.

The only thing I want them to improve it make it collapsiable+resizable instead of only resizable panel. Would be very handy to collapse the panel and open again whenever you want.

It’s compatible for the following blogs:

• Blogger.com
• WordPress.com
• TypePad.com
• LiveJournal
• WordPress Custom
• MoveableType

You just add your blogs in there and the categories and posts history of each blogs will show up. Very fast retrival of categories and posts.

One more thing they should improve is instead of having “Clear Content” button to clear history post that you view before and add new entry, they need to add “Create New Post” button for accessibility and user friendliness.

Clear content button can confuse users whether their old posts got clear away or are they really creating new post entry.
Well it’s abit hard to explain, you got to test it out to see what I mean by that.

Ok now this is gonna be my replacement for “JustBlogIt” and I’m loving it.

I think you’ll like that too.
Get it at Performancing.com.

Oh yah, you got to have firefox 1.5 to use it.

Updated::
Just checked the Performancing site and Jed Brown has posted a nice compilation of HOW TO: Using Performancing for Firefox article with screen shots and a nice spell check firefox extension link. Worth checking out.
I was looking for this kind of article yesterday…abit slow with documentation I guess but still it’s there now and the article is really useful.

Technorati Tags: firefox, extension, technorati, performancing

Last week my blog was down with some bugs. Here are fixes and some resolutions for those bugs.
The main issue was all about incompatibility between WP 1.5.2 and MySql 5.0.1 on IIS 6. My blog being on windows server with IIS 6 and the server was on move, I had a bit of headache moving around my nameservers and this bug fixing. Hopefully those are the last bug to fix and my blog seem working fine now. Anyway I compiled the following notes for whoever faces the same kind of bugs would fix theirs easily.

Version 1.5.2 is incompatible with mysql version 5.0.15 when installed on a server runing IIS 6.0. This appears to be related to variable type mis-matches that are more strictly enforced by mysql 5 than 4.1.

Error: 1 (The whole blog down with only that message)

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in …/home/blog/wp-includes/gettext.php on line 66

Fix: Error on function array_shift
search function readint()
Replace line 66 from:

return array_shift(unpack('V', $this->STREAM->read(4)));

to the following:

$tmp = unpack('V', $this->STREAM->read(4));
return array_shift($tmp);

and on in other functions array_shift

Ref: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/39279
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/48398

Error: 2 (Categories down with this message)

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in …/wp-includes/classes.php on line 629

Fix: Changing line 629 from:

$category = &get_category($this->get('cat'));

to something like:

$crom = $this->get('cat');
$category = &get_category($crom);

Ref: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1614
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1808

Error: 3 (Cannot add comment if you’re not login)

WordPress database error: [Out of range value adjusted for column 'user_id' at row 1]

Fix: Remove STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION from the sql_mode of my.ini

Ref: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/48933
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/48940
forums.eqdkp.com
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?100,51432,51523
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32071
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=14256

Dear friends and visitors,

You might have noticed, mayvelous been down for a few days and I’m glad to announce that it’s finally back on.

I had a bit of issue with my hosting server and also had to do some bug fix.
Anyway it’s all fine now and normal posting to follow up.

See you around.
Cheers.

Over at Arloo blog, Wai Pyo has compiled a neat note on short chat/interview of mayvelous blog and well yah abit of me.

Last week I interviewed “Mayvelous” about her blog and her opinions on blogging. Actually I had been trying to interviewed her since the 1st week of November but didn’t have a chance since I was quite busy playing poker(just kidding!). At last, I finally met her on Yahoo last week.

Check it at Arloo.

No more waiting for invites.
It’s open for everyone now.
Account sign up.