Techknow

Technology from my perspective. Decisions geeks makes with planning can effect generations.

WordPress Tip: You cannot move a blog with the Thesis theme enabled

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow, WordPress

Having moved WordPress blogs before, the process is not as easy as it should be but it’s also not very difficult. That is, however, unless you’re using the Thesis theme from DYIthemes.

Hopefully this will save you from much grief. If you’re using that theme, you have to disable it first, the move it. And even still, if you re-enable the theme, you must edit some files before you do so.

I experienced this issue both moving WP from one directory on a site to the root directory, and moving the site from one domain to another. No amount of scouring through the database to find the old blog URL and changing it would do the trick. I dug, and I dug and I dug – eradicating all instances of the old blog URL. All to no avail.

When moving the blog, step #4 is to change the WordPress address under Administration > Settings > General and step #5 is the same for the Blog address. If you use the Thesis them and make this change, you will watch as the change immediately reverts.

You can make the change in the database itself and after you load a page on the site, check the DB again and it too has reverted to the old URI(s).

The answer? Check your theme files. The Thesis theme files update when the theme is enabled, hardcoding the site’s URL into the theme code. Do a search for the old URL, and you will find it in the theme code. Change it to the URL of the new/updated site, or disable the theme altogether.

How to pick a great domain name

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

Twelve years ago when I was first picking domain names, the difficulty was finding a domain that was going to have a big presence. Now that is still a challenge, but finding one with a presence as well as being relatively short, full of keywords and easy to read is much more difficult. The main reason it’s so difficult now is rather obvious – so many more domain names are taken than they were 12 years ago.

Additionally, search engines have come a long way. A top player emerged, knocked off competitors who were around much longer, and firmly established itself in the industry: Google. One current key SEO tactic is to make sure your domain name has key terms people are searching for.

There are services you can hire to help you determine this. However, this is Spring 2009 and most businesses are not overflowing with cash to spend.

I found a free way to pick a domain that is full of they keywords you need:
SEO Gems: How to pick a great Domain name

Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7 & IE8) Application Compatibility – VPC Images Updated

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

With the release of Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, Microsoft refreshed the VirtualPC images they provide for compatiblity testing. Along with the previous IE6 and IE7 images, there is now also an image just for IE8. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to refresh the “time bomb” expiration date of April 30, 2009 – just over a month away. There is a Vista image for IE7, which expires 120 days after first run.

On a related note, the stock prices of RAM manufactures saw a nice increase yesterday. Ok, so I’m only kidding. If you didn’t know, this solution means you have to run yet another instance of Windows on your computer.

You don’t like/wont/can’t run VirtualPC you say? There are methods to convert the images to other formats used by other virtual machines. There are other hacks that allow you to run multiple versions of IE on the same Windows install. However, with each of them I have found descrepencies. As any good tester knows, inaccurate testing enviroments are not worth.

If you experience problems with the MS site, you may find yourself needing to use IE7 to get around.

Speed test results: Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) vs. 4 (CS4)

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

When CS3 was released there were some noticeable speed hits. Some of those were due to new features. The general response to CS4 has not been very exciting. The handful of new features Adobe is advertising aren’t exciting many users. Some are weary of upgrading, and if past performance hits hold true for CS4, many will end up waiting for CS5.

There have been a handful of performance comparisons between CS3 and CS4. However, I have not seen much that is both scientific and real world. So I set out to grab a few numbers to quantify any performance differences in a scientific comparison.

For the tests, I chose a few core apps of the suite – InDesign, Illustrator and of course Photoshop. I ran a few extra tests on Photoshop as I know that will be important to many.

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Fixing automated backup connection issues in Mac OS X

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

Creating backups of computer data is nothing new. Each year new techniques and software emerge making it easier for non-geeks to implement backup techniques and automate them. Most businesses and many households use a backup strategy that involves backing up to another computer on the network or even online. I’ll call the computer that needs data backed up the “client” and the computer that is storing the data as a backup the “server” or “remote volume.”

Sometimes the automated connection between the client and server fails. In Mac OS X, I’ve found two different causes for this and below are the fixes for each. I’ve seen reports of these issues occuring with Apple’s Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, Deja Vu and other backup utilties. These issues can also occur with Apple’s Time Capsule.

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