When I came back from my vacation last week, I found that I can no longer log on to the wp-admin of my site. I was freaked out at first and I thought the site got compromised or something. Google search did not find anything useful.

I finally contacted my hosting company, Blue Host, for support. They fixed my problem quickly. The culprit is the Supercache plugin. The plugin created rewrites on the .htaccess file. One of the rewrites caused the domain to redirect to a 404 error instead of loading the wp-admin page.

Earlier I had some issues with Blue Host’s support, but after this incident I am a loyal customer again.

WordPress 2.8 is out and I first tested it on my test site. The automatic upgrading was fine on my test site. I then tried to upgrade my production site. I got this message when I tried.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

It seemed like WordPress uses too much memory and it cannot do the automatic upgrade. I figured that it’s possible I have too many plugins running. I tried to de-activate some of non-essential plugins and I was able to upgrade it afterwards.

The other way to fix this problem is to edit the php.ini file in the wp-admin directory if you have one. If you don’t have a php.ini file, ask your web hosting company to create one for you. Edit it and find the line like this.

memory_limit = 64M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (32MB)

The default is 32MB, I changed it to 64MB.

I recently upgraded my AdRotate plugin from 2.1 to 2.2. After upgrade, I found that the ads were not showing  up any more. I thought there might be some conflicts between plugins. I tried to de-activate and re-activate the plugin, but it didn’t help.

Checking the author’s web site and I found that the way to embed it in the php files has changed. The old way of embedding it is:

<?php adrotate_banner('1'); ?>

This does not work anymore in 2.2. You have to code it this way.

<?php echo adrotate_banner('1'); ?>

I have been using Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to upgrade my blog. It has worked perfectly up until 2.7 upgrade. Ever since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.7, I found that some of the new features do not work, like the flash based image upload and the ability to install plugin directly from within Wordpress dashboard. I didn’t pay much attention to it, because there are workarounds.

When the Wordpress 2.7.1 came out, I tried to use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin again, but this time it cannot dectect there is an upgrade needed. I also noticed there is another automatic upgrade option on the dashboard. It seems like the automatic upgrade is a bulit-in function now. I used the built-in automatic upgrade function to upgrade my blog from 2.7 to 2.7.1 without a problem. I also de-activated the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. After the de-activation of the plugin, I found that I can now use the Wordpress 2.7’s new features. If you find there are something strange about your Wordpress 2.7 installation and you also have the Automatic Upgrade plugin installed, try disable the plugin and see if it helps.

The transition to the new theme has finished without incidents(I think). I took a screenshot of the old theme and posted it here for future reference.

I have been using this Green Park theme for several months now. Even though it looks good on Firefox, it doesn’t on IE 6. The theme has not been updated since 2007. I was searching for a better and up to date theme for a while. Finally, I picked this theme called PrimePress.

As you can see my old green kombitz logo doesn’t match the new theme. I had to redo the logo again. The design is the same as the old logo, only the colors have changed. If you are wondering how I created the logo, here is the tutorial I have been using. This is a great tutorial showing you how to use the free GIMP tool to create a Web 2.0 logo. I have no problems with the steps except the Step 12. To achieve the effect, I used FG to Transparent gradient and I applied the blend tool to the reflection layer from top to bottom. BTW, the font is 64 points, Bauhaus 93.