I just finished upgrading this blog to the latest Wordpress release (2.9.1).

I usually do a little research just to see if anyone has any problems with their upgrades and while I certainly appreciate the automatic upgrade options for the Wordpress core and plugins I tend to be a little too paranoid to click the upgrade button.

I have before for very small plugins but I generally like being a bit more cautious because I have read about the odd person’s tale of woe… loosing a database or getting an internal server error message….etc.

My approach is usually what is reckomended.

1. Backup all your site’s files!
2. Backup your database!
3. I sometimes upload the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in temp spaces… and rename them when ready..
4. I disable all plugins
5. I check the config.php file to see if there are changes to make (very rarely does it need anything)
6. I then upload all root files (index.php etc..)
7. I rename the wp-includes and wp-admin folders..
8. Login to the admin…
9. Click to upgrade the DB as required
10. enable each plugin…. upgrade if required…

Voila!

I’ve rarely had a problem.

But I have made mistakes… and a few times I forgot one of the steps, like disabling the plugins. So in my debugging I found some helpful ressources, like this blog article on how to manually disable WordPress plugins using SQL. It may not be something that you want to try if you don’t have any experience in web development, SQL..etc.

The article is called “Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database“

There’s a ton of web hosts out there. Some have huge data centers and some are the mom and pop type. I personally lease a server for various projects but when I was thinking about webhosting for the blogs I wanted to start in my trek to learn how to develop blogs and income online… I decided to go with another hosting solution. And found a great deal.

A few days ago I started looking at hosting packages suggested on various sites and from the Wordpress site. Since I was going to use Wordpress as my blogging platform I thought looking over there made sense.

I happened to stumble upon another hosting company that wasn’t mentioned on the Wordpress site (at least I don’t recall that they were) and saw a deal I couldn’t pass up.

1&1 have quite a package. It’s called the 1&1 Home package, 2 domains and 1 year free hosting for $4.99 per month. You pay for the first month and have the year free. This package comes with a 2 year term, so the second year you’re paying the monthly fees. But with the storage, the domains and the extras that are included in the package… it’s well worth it!

I’ve transfered a blogger.com site over to my new 1&1 account and I have to say that Wordpress runs very well on that account. I have no complaint at all.

If anyone is currently looking for a hosting package for a Wordpress blog check it out. There’s only 6 days left on this deal.

A couple of days ago I was writing an article for one of my blogs and wanted to put a picture in the article but wondered what was the best place to look. After looking in a couple of places I found a new site I’d never seen before.

At first I searched on Flickr’s Creative Commons website but couldn’t really find what I was looking for. Flickr’s Creative Commons site is a great place to look if you need some stock photo images.

Then I stumble across a site that I had never heard of. A website called PicApp.

What I was looking for was a couple of pictures, both of hockey players. Hadn’t found the guys I was looking for over at the other site but when I searched on PicApp a bunch of pictures were found.

Check out the PicApp website and take a look at PicApp’s advantages page.

They even have a WordPress plugin that you can find here on the PicApp blog.

So why did I choose Wordpress?

Well, Wordpress is one of the most used blogging tools out there and since it’s been around for a while it’s also quite polished.

Many bloggers use Wordpress and there are tons of plugins that you can get to provide various functionality.

A few plugins I’ve decided to use:
Contact Form 7 – http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/
This plugin provides a contact form that allows people to send a message through the website to an email address.

WP-SpamFree – http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/plugins/wp-spamfree
This plugin provides some spam filtering for the blog comments.

You can also find many Wordpress plugins and Themes over at http://wordpress.org/extend/

Wordpress also has some great features that may come in handy when writting. In the editor there is a handy spell checker. The spell check is one that I will use quite often, it’s quite handy in finding nasty typos.

Another very handy feature is that Wordpress will automatically save draft copies while writing blog articles so if you happen to shutdown the browser a bit pre-maturely all may not be lost.

It’s also quite easy to change the website’s theme or layout at the click of a button… once you’ve uploaded the theme’s files of course.

So all in all I believe Wordpress is a very solid tool to work with. I’ll post about handy plugins, widgets and anything else that I find helps me in this process.