A friend of mine, Dee Lynn, wanted some place online to put pictures of her travels and blog about what interests her. So I happily obliged and created another WordPress blog in Arguable. Her site is arguable.ca/dee.
It was easy enough to set up. I just created a folder under the root of arguable called dee and copied the WP files there. The first time I went into the site it created all the MySQL tables and set everything up for me. I then turned on the Akismet spam plugin and installed and enabled the NextGen Gallery that I have been using for photos.
WordPress has been upgraded to 2.5.1 without any issues (so far.) Arguable was the victim of a SQL Injection hack for the last several months and I finally got around to doing something about it, namely upgrading WordPress. I noticed when I was doing the backup that a new user account had been created so I removed it and then changed all the passwords of the accounts in WP and MySQL. I might still be compromised but I will have to let that wait for another day. Akismet also got updated, but that was way too easy. The NG-Gallery plugin did not need to be upgraded and it still works just fine.
I did the first half of the upgrade process last night and then finished it this morning. I deleted all the spam comments that Akismet had found before I backed up the MySQL database and the WP directories. In the morning Akismet had already blocked another 19 spam comments! That is one plugin I will never live without. Even during the easy and fast upgrade of Akismet one spam comment got through before I managed to get the latest version of Akismet running again.
I found a tool (PIXresizer) to resize and rotate images that works with folders and bulk image processing. Now I can put all 400 or so of my pictures online as well so expect a deluge of pictures in the next couple of weeks.
After updating Ubuntu I decided I wanted a photo gallery on this blog. I downloaded NextGEN Gallery from alex.rabe. It has gotten several good reviews so I thought I would give it a try. The install was easy enough but it did require a bit of tweaking of the Apache config file to get things working properly. I had to increase the size of the PHP Memory Limit to 8M and then finally to 48M to be able to run the plugin and then to create thumbnails of each picture as it was downloaded. I also increased the size of PHP Max Upload Size from 2M to 8M and PHP Max Post Size: from 8M to 16M. Most of my pictures are just over 2M in size thus the increase in the limits. I have noticed however that downloading the full size picture can take a while so I may have to resize all my pictures before I download them.