Asymptomatic

I've been hosting my own content on the web since, oh, 1995. I've been on many hosts over that time, moving sites from host to host. During that time, I've been on some good hosts and some really awful hosts, and I have really yet to find the ultimate host that I can recommend unreservedly.

Perhaps you have been having sites hosted long enough to have acquired some horror stories. A while back, I had my sites hosted with a company called A World Wide Mall. AWWM was pretty reasonably priced, but as with most hosts, the customer service was pretty lousy. And one day, the guy who ran the service decided to fold up the company and move on without notifying any customers. He just took his datacenter and left. With all of my data. Lovely.

I'm sure that folks have similar (or worse) stories. I have had service where I thought I was getting protected backup and redundant storage, when really it was all on one box and when the box died, I lost a lot. I tried hosting at 1&1 once, and after playing with it, I immediately filled out their cancellation form. Total time with their service: about 5 minutes....

With the looming release of WordPress 2.0, there are a bunch of folks that are submitting bug fixes that say things like, "I would submit this to Trac, but I don't know how."

I think even more people are suggesting that writing to the mailing list with their bugs to "confirm" them is better than submitting them directly to Trac. I suppose if you're not sure something is a bug, it might be worthwhile to ask someone else (I would ask on IRC at #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) but it really is better to have a formal record of an issue, even if it turns out that what you're experiencing is expected behavior. If you really fear that it's something to do specifically with your installation, check on IRC or maybe try a fresh install.

Nevertheless, it might be useful to folks to learn how I do it. I'm not saying my method is correct, just that it seems to get the job done with few complaints from the devs who commit my patches. It's also a good method to use on Windows. (Sorry, someone else can document command-line Subversion use - not that I don't know it, I'm just lazy.) Here we go... more

eSKUeL is a PHP-based alternative to phpMyAdmin, which is getting really stinking slow with new features.

Well, I finally took the plunge on WordPress 1.3. The new stuff looks pretty good, but I'm more interested in the back end running smoothly. Of course, there were a couple of issues during the upgrade.

Currently there is a problem with the comments appearing correctly when upgrading. I feel partially responsible for this because I wrote the function that upgrades the database, but it's not my code that causes the problem. Directly.

The trick is that when converting from a numeric to an enumerated type MySQL doesn't do anything special to the data. It shouldn't. And although this is good for keeping the existing data intact when you change a field type, you need to know certain things about the data type when you do the conversion....

You probably haven't noticed, but I'm trying to change. I've spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (months?) working on public projects. Significant amounts of my time have gone into making WordPress better, not just with the hacks I've written, but with a couple of core code changes. I have also been beta-testing some software from MicroOLAP hoping to make it better before it's released. And there's always the Blog Breakdown chart, which possibly started me on this whole new direction. more