Your PC. Prepared for Anything.
WordPress
WordPress 2.9 Available!
Dec 25th
WP 2.9 is out for your upgrading pleasure. Finally, the ability to upgrade multiple (up to 10) plug-ins simultaneously is built-in. Video embedding is also much easier. Also, you can now do some basic image manipulation, such as cropping and rotating images.
Sorry!
Oct 4th
We recently incorporated Twitter into the PreparedPC website. TwitterTools was doing its job, passing along the Tweets we created from the WordPress dashboard to Twitter. Then we hooked up Twitterfeed, which tweeted every time we published a new blog post. So far, so good.
Then, we told TwitterTools to create a blog post from every Tweet we created. D-oh!
TwitterTools and Twitterfeed dutifully created an endless loop, with each one creating a duplicate blog post and Tweet every hour for several days.
Our apologies to subscribers and Twitter followers. We’ve fixed the issue and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Weekly Round-up 2009-09-12
Sep 11th
A quick run-down of posts and tweets from the past week:
Untangle for Windows-Free Unified Threat Management for the Rest of Us – We posted about Untangle for Windows, a free download of an open-source based Unified Threat Management suite. The Linux-based version of Untangle is very stable and mature, and Untangle for Windows, though it is beta software, shows great promise. We will be detailing our experiences with Untangle for Windows in an upcoming post.
Windows 7: How to Reset the Recycle Bin – In Windows 7, a corrupted recycle bin can prevent you from deleting files or emptying the recycle bin. Tech-recipes.com shows us how to fix this issue.
WordPress 2.8.4 – Lorelle warns us that a security vulnerability in all pre-2.8.4 version of WordPress (used for self-hosted blogs, as opposed to WordPress.com blogs) is being actively exploited. Upgrade now to close that security hole.
GeoChirp – GeoChirp is a Twitter/Google Maps mash-up that shows what your neighbors (as identified by your and their IP addresses) are tweeting.
Keeps those comments and questions coming. We appreciate them!
Welcome to PreparedPC.com!
Aug 23rd
OK, we’ve actually been around for a little while, but wanted to highlight our site’s shiny new theme (WP Premium).
Keeping with our philosophy of using open-source or free software wherever feasible, we chose the free version of the theme. More >
WordPress 2.6.1 Released
Aug 16th
WordPress announced the release of the version 2.6.1 of its software, which includes a fix for the category description bug that many of us experienced after upgrading.
Interestingly, the blog announcement for this version says:
If youre happy with 2.6, however, keep on using it. You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.
Takeaway: Now that 2.6.1 is out (and the category bug fixed), take a look at the original 2.6 announcement to get an idea of the new features. Our favorite feature is the “preview a theme without activating it” — very slick. Composing posts is improved. Rather than clicking a button to edit HTML, you actually write in “HTML mode”, so you can see exactly what’s going on–no more surprises.
If you’re ready to move to 2.6.1, backup your current installation and get ready to upgrade.
WordPress Users – Wait Until 2.6.1 To Upgrade
Jul 25th
OK, we admit it. While we at PreparedPC.com don’t always live on the cutting edge, we did get googly-eyed when we read about the new features in WordPress 2.6.
After reading the WordPress upgrade guide, we decided to make the leap. After backing up and carefully copying files to right places, and reactivating the plug-ins, we launched our browser and checked to make sure everything was OK.
It wasn’t. The categories that should have been listed on the sidebar were GONE!
No problem though, thanks to David Cumps. He ran into the exact same issue. He identified that a bug in the 2.6 upgrade script deleted the category descriptions from the WordPress database table wp_term_taxonomy. He also graciously wrote up specific instructions to fix the issue by manually updating the database table. This worked perfectly!
Now that the upgrade is behind us, we look forward to taking advantage of the new features to make the useful information on this site even prettier.
Takeaway: Software upgrades are never fun, especially when something breaks. Apparently this issue will be fixed in WordPress 2.6.1, so wait a little longer if you plan to upgrade.
Thank you again to David Cumps.