Tweaked the beta blog this evening, and also decided to look up a basic MediaWiki installation for CentOS 7, and it looked straight forward enough that I semi installed it tonight. I say semi installed because I’m getting a blank page, and according to my research that means some form of PHP error. Rather than spend most of the evening playing with a new site I ended up deciding to shelve it for another day, along with the remaining wordpresses, one to port over and one to recreate.
Oh, and it isn’t much but I did manage to animate a tiny bit tonight… here is the current WIP:
I’m almost done setting up the new blog. I’ve decided to keep the same template but make some tweaks to the header images (lots of new ones!). Once this goes live you guys will hopefully be happy with the load speed. It is light years faster than BlueHost. I won’t be turning certain features back on (such as gallery, the twitch page, etc) until I go over some other new plugins I’ve discovered, but for the most part everything necessary to run the site is in place. I’ll have one more website to port over, sadly that will have to wait until the weekend most likely just to make sure I have plenty of time allotted to give it proper care; once I start something it’s pretty difficult for me to stop. I think I’ll read up on how to install MediaWiki, or get some animation done. Been a few days since I’ve last touched SFM.
If anyone is curious to see the new site in its beta phase I can share a link. Just make contact with me and I’ll put you on the waiting slacking list. I would be interested in knowing how fast it loads with more than a couple people accessing it and maybe some other potential discoveries.
Once I have all of this taken care of I’m thinking of writing up my own tutorial for setting up a wordpress install. It isn’t that difficult, but some of the things I had to do were not all that well documented; taking a small bit of guesswork to get resolve certain things. For example I still find it strange that CentOS 7 didn’t come with firewalld installed by default? O_o
I got a shiny new wordpress install on my new droplet server! I had to backtrack through my dependencies a little today, but I managed to get WordPress to run among other resources. Oddly enough, the latest PHP version on the main repo for CentOS 7 is 5.2 (the current one is 7.4). I’m actually surprised that dependency is THAT out of date! Then again CentOS is more geared towards business and stability, which means unlike other Linux distros like Mint or Ubuntu it has to run on an older kernel and other dependencies unless the owner has reason to tinker with it themselves. If I were maintaining the repo it would at least be in the later 6 series for security reasons.
Tomorrow I’ll look into importing at least one existing WordPress install just to see how it goes. If all goes well I’ll add the other installs over, and if not I have my own ways of solving the problem. :zorak: Once this is all said and done I think visitors will like the load times, at least until they start reading the damned place. :rick:
If anyone reading this blog is familiar at all with self hosted WordPress sites they may know of a plugin called Jetpack provided by WordPress themselves. You connect your blog to WordPress.com which can be quite handy for more than a few items, such as spam protection, the option to syndicate your posts to social media websites the moment you make your blog post, and more where that came from. One thing they’ve been pushing with the newest version of WordPress is the new Gutenberg post editor, and they sent me an email to get me hyped about an all new feature that would totally be worth switching to Gutenberg for… FUCKING GIFS!!
Animated images — also known as GIFs — have become one of the hottest social media tools.
Whoa, you mean to tell me that GIFS… a picture format that was invented around the time I came into being…. is now a hot young social media tool? That’s oddly appropriate since most people in my age group at work happen to be tools on social media!
They tell a story, add humor and emotion, and can create a lasting impression on millions of readers.
Your move Jetpack…
The newest version of Jetpack adds a GIF block for the new editor, putting the world’s largest GIF library at your fingertips.
Perhaps I’ll give Gutenberg another shot at some point just to see the gif selection sometime in the not too distant future, if I’m bored enough…
Why say something with words when you can say it with a dancing turtle?
Wait, they taught Mitch McConnell how to dance? :morty: :rick:
In a recent update to WordPress (starting with 5.0 IIRC) they changed the text editor style to a new version called Gutenberg that changes the way you write your posts. This was being tested in earlier versions of WordPress as a mere plugin, out of curiocity I took a quick look at it during that period and went back to the regular style at the time just because I didn’t have much time to scope it out. Fast forward to the 5.0 update and now everyone has to use it (unless you install the classic editor plugin). I was tempted to go back to the classic editor myself, but then I decided to test myself by writing some posts with it.
Upon immediate glance I can tell this is designed for posting via smart devices… that’s strike 1. It’s great to include more devices so you can give writers a chance to post their thoughts or content from almost anywhere, but at the same time you shouldn’t neglect your other audience that holds a powerful tool that most mobile users sorely lack, a well sized keyboard to type on.
Gutenberg’s most praised feature is the “block” system… because this is 2018 and blocks are a thing. Instead of having a small toolbar and clicking an icon, like blockquoting something or posting an image, you click a plus and choose if you want an image, a quote, hell even a paragraph! You know, something you could write NATURALLY! Again, it makes more sense on mobile… but on PC that’s just an added step. Though not to completely bash it I do like being able to move paragraphs and other blocks around if I feel the need to arrange something.
I’ve mainly gone back to using the classic editor plugin. I like some of the ideas they’ve put into the new editor, but the inconveniences outweigh the new features. I’ll stick with the classic editor for now.
Soooo I had an almost pants shitting experience… during my lunch break the other day I checked my email only to discover that my website(s) have been deactivated due to a malware attack. :rick: Imagine having to mentally process this while being stuck a mile away from being able to do a fucking thing. :zorak: Eventually when I did get home I went through the malware scan provided by my webhost, backed off all of my files is, deleted everything, installed a fresh version of WordPress via FTP and got a hold of BlueHost to scan my server and give me the go ahead to go back online. I cleaned out the infected files in my blog install (I only had 4) and as you can see I’m up and running again with all of my posts and settings in check. Other blogs that I run through this domain will be following suit, with my brother being the next one to deploy. Fortunately it only added three files to his install, and I didn’t have to edit any lines.
Once that is taken care of I’ll have a lot of catching up to do on not just blogging, but all of the other shit I put off to try and fix this. I guess it’s another blessing I got those new hard drives. I’ll be planning to make backups more frequently. Setting the blog back up was easier this time around.
I may have more good news too; I found my old database holding my old posts among other things, and I may be able to recover those and make my blog whole again. I’ll experiment on a test site to see if I can get it to work, but if I can that would make me really happy.
After doing some research I’ve decided to pull the Steam profile plugin for the blog; the plugin hasn’t been touched in about three years, and the author said that in order for it to work on https sites it would have to be completely overhauled. So that’ll have to be retired along with some other plugins that have issues over https…
I’ll keep adding/removing and changing things as I go. With fewer widgets I may have to look into playing with the overall appearance again. Might do more tomorrow if I’m not completely stunned. I came home today and basically passed out for a few hours, still feel a bit out of it. Like I could sleep for an entire 24 hrs if I wanted to.
The dentist’s office saw my medical history template and loved every bit of it, said it was professional looking. 😛 They also really love the site. I added the testimonials for it today, there’s also a form so that people can submit their own (with moderation of course). I’d love to find more work like this, it’s right up my alley and a nice way to make some coin on one of many hobbies.
Working on it has given me some ideas for this website, and the main Guild Of Slackers one. I’ve thought about making forums again but no one seems to really use those, or shows a desire to use them since we have an IRC channel and a mumble server. As far as the WordPress side I’m not sure what to do with that other than give it a fresh new look. :
I spent a good portion of the afternoon getting my local dentist setup with a new domain and hosting. I’ve also been put in charge of setting up the website! 😀 So far they seem to be impressed with my knowledge of WordPress. I even crafted a demonstration that they just loved. Now I’m working on the real thing! 😛 Well, I was until I decided to take a break. Getting close to bedtime, dinner and all that jazz. Figured I’d do a little blogging since I didn’t have much to write home about yesterday. But yeah, today was a good day. 😀
