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Sorry for the flurry of posts today, I need to get all this stuff out before I forget about the site again for six months.

Orig­i­nally when I switched over to this host I had decided that I was just going to stick with the apt-​​provided ver­sion of word­press and just deal with the issues, but it turns out that their mod­u­lar­iza­tion is too leaky, and their code churn rate is too high for that to be a viable strat­egy, what with the low turnover rate of the Ubuntu pack­age. Once I’d fallen too many released behind, all of the AJAX stuff started to break. I couldn’t even reply to com­ments from the con­sole or post any pictures.

So if you’re look­ing for how to do this, here is what worked for me in early 2011 (this post will no doubt date rapidly):

1. As root, type # echo wordpress hold | dpkg --set-selections (note that this step is apt cargo cult magic which may fail in the future; I’ll update this if so).
2. Edit /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php, com­ment­ing out the line which says define('WP_CORE_UPDATE', false);.
3. Down­load the latest word­press tar­ball from http://wordpress.org/.
4. Unpack it somewhere.
5. Backup /​usr/​share/​wordpress (I used # tar czf backup.tgz /usr/share/wordpress but you may (by which I mean should) want to do some­thing more bulletproof.
6. Do # cp -R /path/to/wp/wordpress/ /usr/share/
7. Look at the output and cleanup as appro­pri­ate. I ended up having to nuke /usr/share/workpress/wp-include/js/ and then recopy it from the unpacked tarball.
8. Go back to your dash­board, as you’ll likely have to trig­ger a data­base update or some­thing similar.
9. Make sure your site or sites are still working.

Feel free to com­ment if you have any ques­tions but I am hardly an expert on the Word­Press side. Good luck.

I have some polit­i­cal posts almost done, and will post them (both! I promise!) in the coming week, but mostly I am think­ing that I should really do some­thing else with this space. I clearly don’t have enough opin­ions to post daily (even on twit­ter). I have to keep the machine around, since I am host­ing the farm busi­nesses site on the same server, but I am not sure what to do with this domain.

I no longer read enough, nor like enough of what I do read, for this to be a ded­i­cated space for reviews and crit­i­cism. My writ­ing output is too low for it to be some place to dump story snip­pets and chunks of works in progress. I don’t hon­estly have unique enough opin­ions on cur­rent events, nor do I have enough sub­ject matter exper­tise for this site to be ded­i­cated to pol­i­tics. Farm stuff goes at the farm blog.

In all like­li­hood, it’ll con­tinue to be as it is, as I don’t have the spare time to make it into any­thing else. Too busy build­ing nurs­ery tables and (if we get some rain) laying fence.

I am moving this site over to where every­thing else I run lives.

Not that this site is par­tic­u­larly active, but if you’re look­ing to access it, it may be up and down over the week­end as I get every­thing trans­ferred to the new host.

UPDATE: If you can see this, every­thing should be switched over.  Because I was bored while I was wait­ing, I fid­dled with the layout, and added some Type­Kit stuff to try it out.  Mostly I think that it looks a tad better, although if I upgrade to a real Type­Kit account, I think I’ll be on the look­out for some better fonts.