noel alanguilan

wordpress 2.7 introduced me to post revisions — these are draft copies of your posts. these copies are saved in your wordpress database along with your posts, comments, etc. sometimes my revisions it gets to be ridiculously too many. apparently, the revisions are retained even after you have published the post thereby occupying unnecessary space in the database. so far, there is no built-in point-and-click method of getting rid of these revisions from the database.

i’ve found two ways to delete these revisions.

first, the hard way. fire up your phpadmin; choose your wordpress database; click on the sql icon and a window will pop up where you can enter and sql command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

then click on ‘go’.

phpadmin will tell just just how many revisions were deleted. you’re done.

of course, there’s always the easy way. download and install a plugin called wp-optimize. this plugin can remove all post revisions plus optimize the database tables–the two functions that i usually use phpadmin for the maintenance of the sql tables (aka wordpress databases). other plugins have more database features but more is not necessarily better. its just more. this one’s right for my purpose.

i woke up with an update notice on the wordpress dashboard. i usually dread this event because it meant two days of updating nine wordpress installations that i keep. it takes two days because i have to backup my wordpress databases and files then manually delete almost all the wordpress files then upload the fresh. i have to do this nine times and my internet connection is relatively slow. tedious.

the good new is that with version 2.7 i can easily update my wordpress installations — they included a update script. heed the advice and backup your wordpress database and files before doing the upgrade.

once you got everything backed up and you’re sure that the backups are good take the jump and press that upgrade button. all of my upgrades were successful so far. there are two more upgrades i have to do.

i upgraded seven wordpress installations in less than an hour. that is a huge savings in time.

just a quick note before immersing myself in work again. its good to know that yahoo webhosting is somehow keeping up. they’ve made wordpress 2.6.2 as the default wordpress install.

i’ve been having a hard time embedding some music videos from youtube into this blog. politics most likely. mtv has some issues about licensing with youtube that became serious enough for mtv to set up mtvmusic.com.

its still new and therefore some edges are rough but…

version 2.6.3 of wordpress came out of nowhere. it has a security update for snoopy which gets the feeds being shown in the dashbard. they say the vulnerability is low risk but its still a risk hence the sudden upgrade. the good thing is that you only need two files to make the upgrade:

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php

just download them (they’re from trac.wordpress.org) and upload to your blog’s wp-includes/ subdirectory overwriting the two files there and you’re set.

this is the easiest upgrade i’ve done so far.

i was looking over the plugins page of one of the blogs i manage and the plugins program is telling me that it had disabled a plugin — reporting a file with an unfamiliar name and a series of ‘../’ before it. hmmm… alarm bells rang in my head.

a little looking and i find the file under the tmp subdirectory in my server. i tried deleting the file and the server kept giving me that ‘permission denied’ message. more alarm bells. i downloaded the file and changed the permissions to none executable and the only by owner and group — no public access and no one has write access.

taking a look at the file, i found that its a php file and the rest are hexadecimal values which leads me to conclude that its a malicious file and that its hiding it’s digital purpose — nothing good by the looks of it. i, myself, do not have the time right now to decode it so if someone out there is willing, i can send you the file. just leave a comment and i’ll send the file to you.

after preparing for it for more than a month, i wasn’t able to attend the first philippine wordcamp. bummer. i actually was dressed and ready to go already but fate and my mom had other ideas. you see, a few days before wordcamp was my mother’s birthday. she lives about 90 kilometers south of manila. she, along with my dad, boarded a very early bus to manila and was on my doorstep by 7:30 in the morning.

my mom wanted a late birthday celebration with her daughter-n-law, son and grandson.

how can i refuse?

so apologies to matt and migs for not attending wordcamp philippines 2008.

but my mom wins hands down.

i’ve been wanting to post these photos for a while now. this was the time when tito pacing, rosie and randy came with us when we visited san pablo city. we took them to a short trek to lake pandin — one of the seven lakes in the city proper. we also had a ride on a large bamboo raft — my first in this lake. all in all, i think tito pacing and the others enjoyed themselves.

robin took a swim after the ride but with a life vest.

this post is an experiment in using a wordpress photo gallery plugin.

trek to lake pandin

it was drizzling when we started the trek to lake pandin.

we have arrived

we have arrived

yambo

lake yambo is just beyond that 'v' at the far end of the lake. pandin and yambo are often called the twin lakes.

horsie

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing

randy

robin wants to swim

robin wants to swim and we didn't allow him to hence that face. rosie and cherry is at the back

bamboo rafts

we rode the bamboo rafts to the the far end of the lake.

fiddling with the camera

tito pacing on the raft on the lake fiddling with his camera.

other visitors

there were other visitors too

randy and the pose

nearing sunset

nearing sunset and about to take our trek back.

ducks

ducks. mates i guess

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i just got word that the wordcamp programme is up as well as the schedule for the talks which you can sign up for online. they have more sponsors up (thank you) so i updated my list — i might win something. i’d like a free black wordcamp shirt (hint hint). i already signed up for a couple of sessions and i hope to get my pass within the week.

it would be good to be on the lasallian grounds again.

blue will do if there isn’t any black (hint hint).

its been A terribly frustrating day. i’ve seen enough of “error establishing a database connection” to last me until the next version.

i was just trying to post something on one blog and experimenting on another and i keep getting this message. i have several wordpress blogs in different subdomains under alanguilan.com. one setup shouldn’t affect another but in this case its site wide — i get the same message on all the blogs at the same time. once for a few minutes things go well and i can access the sites but it goes south again soon after.

when i get an opportunity to check the sql databases with phpmyadmin the databases for each blog checks out fine. so my guess is its the main mysql database that’s getting messed up. there are utilities to repair the database and several backups of the thing via yahoo’s control panel so i’m not terribly worried. its just inconvenient for the moment.

so far the database seems stable and i haven’t seen the error message for an hour now. i hope it stays that way.