It’s a pre-requisite, of anyone who’s asking for help with something, to have a rough idea what it is they’re asking. The thingummy won’t do the whatsit. Every single trade, every small specialism has its coda, its terminology, names for the components unique to this or that moving part, this or that tool.

WordPress is no different. And although it often seems like a monstrous impenetrable engine, it’s actually less of a machine than a tool, or a series of tools. And since it is open-source, made by lots and lots of people all doing it for love, WordPress can sometimes feel cobbled together, patched, slightly worn in some places and with odd bits missing.

After the fear and trembling over the many hacked blogs in version 2.7 a bit back, we were assured that the latest versions are pretty much secure. And we were promised easy-to-do upgrades. One or a couple of clicks.

The devs are absolutely aware how tiresome it is to have to download a new copy of WordPress every time they fix something. Plugins, too. It was okay when we only had to do that once a year, or so. But when these upgrades come as often as one a month, and if you have say 20 Plugins (the add-ons that deliver extra functionality, Share This buttons are an example) and it’s not uncommon to have a lot more than 20 Plugins, phew that’s a lot of messing about at the back end that the average blogger would rather spend blogging.

So, this morning in the boiler room here there were 3 Plugins needing upgrades, and Version 2.8.5 ready and waiting with an alert in pale yellow at the top of my screen.

So that’s 4 distinct lots of messing about downloading and putting files in the right place, powering up the ftp client and uploading, then going into each one and activating. And that’s just the plugins. Has the two-click upgrader ever worked? No. So nowadays when you have a question, you ask Twitter.

@brendadadaWould anyone out there have a simple explanation/solution as to why my #WordPress upgrades & Plugins won’t do it automatically?

Back came the very sensible and helpful reply

@publicenergy@brendadada It might be the folder access rights where the plugins are held – my wp-content & plugins are 755 (write by owner, every1 read)

And

@publicenergy@brendadadaAll Wordpress installation should be 644 – executable by server, except the ones that get uploaded and changed – wp-content

File permissions have change modes – chmod is the abbreviation. These modes set permissions for who can and who cannot read, write and/or execute changes to your WordPress files. Basically, when you’re the owner and signed in, you need to be able to read, write and change almost anything, but visitors perhaps only need to read and/or write.

To make sure the Plugins and the WP versions can be upgraded from within, it’s essential that some things would have to be executable by someone else, so the chmod permissions become more open. With us so far? Yes.

So up with Cyberduck and the file permissions are upped appropriately and within seconds, this blog has disappeared. No 404/403/503 error messages, no dashboard, no sign-in page, nothing, nowt, nada, zilch. As if the tap’s been turned off, nothing.

@brendadadaMagic disappearing blog Can the people with my ftp details please help? And anyone else with advice?

Stef Lewandowski is a web entrepreneur and one of the heroes behind BCCDIY, which if you’ve not been following, is a basically a do-it-yourself and far nicer version of Birmingham City Council’s new £28m website. He makes lots of other nice things too, including a site for daddies, often with a baby on his knee. Here’s his advice, as a list. It’s really helpful.

1. Get your ftp client up and back up ALL the files from the site. Don’t over-write your last backup, you might need that. Do a new one, so you have at least two copies, your previous one and this new one, the one where the problem is.

2. If you think you’ve been hacked (and we thought upping the File permissions might have exposed a bit of nasty script from that previous hack) get a copy of TextMate (which has a helpful 30 day free trial) and use ‘find’ to search for anything containing ‘execute’ or ’script’. It could be that a bit of php script is hidden inside a jpg, so make sure you tell TextMate to see all files.

3. Delete that file. Re-install wordpress and restore from a clean copy, saving only the wp-config file and wp-content.

4. Change all your passwords. Change mysql and FTP user passwords. Goes without saying really, but especially if you suspect a hack.

5. Once the blog’s back up install WP Firewall Plugin and also WP Database Backup ( with settings for amazon S3).

Great advice – do them. Phew.

Except it didn’t all work quite like that, and we really don’t know why. The lovely Josh Hart, creator of Livebrum, sauntered onto the scene, whistling (I think) at about 11.30 and upped the file permissions again, the ones I’d dropped back down earlier. He thinks it’s possible that the original changes didn’t ’stick’ leaving some of the permissions at 000 which of course would mean no read/write/access for anyone.

Luckily there is no sign of a hack.

At least not that we can see…

And the whole thing reminded me of oil and coil, springs and flywheels, gaskets and accumulators, governors and gimlets.

I remember asking my mother why Gracie didn’t know what her thingummybob was called, seemed pretty ludicrous to this enquiring 5 year old. She said it was a wartime secret, that nobody knew what they were making in these huge armaments factories all over the country. And that you’d better not ask because even if you did know, it’d be a secret.

We were down for about two hours altogether this morning, that’s all. Thank you @publicenergyand @stefand @joshhart. WordPress is great. It’s the open source people who make the thingummybobs, I love ‘em all.

So: to the big question, still unanswered:

Would anyone out there have a simple explanation/solution as to why my #WordPress upgrades & Plugins won’t do it automatically?Similar Posts:

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Adsense is here. For the first time ever (screams of horror), there are adverts on this website.

I know, look- I’m really very sorry. Last time this was mentioned, we’d been approached by Adorama and that other lot, B&H, both of whom were vying to offer  between 3 and 5% of any sale they made from an advert here. One of them even sent me a ‘typical’ page we could copy – a huge page of expensive plastic camera pictures, all clickable-through to their shopping pages. Ugh.

I could never advocate anyone buying one of those big plastic DLRs, and would hate to inadvertently be the cause of any new camera purchase, let alone profit from the exploitative gadget-head trade. Definitely never, ever is there going to be any of that, no way. Promise.

But, for a while now, the referral logs here have been showing lots of page views from searches for images. Not surprising, really. It’s what makes the site work, after all. These visitors hang around only long enough to screencapture or download a picture. They’re not looking at the site, definitely not reading anything, there’s not time, and the vast majority of them, well probably all, never come back.

In this pie chart from Google Analytics (of the first couple of hours of its implementation today), direct traffic is from people who have bookmarked the site or typed it into their browser. The referring sites slice of pie is people who land here after seeing the url on another website (maybe my portfolio site), or in a link on my name when commenting somewhere, or on a blogroll. There’s also quite a bit of referral traffic coming in from people who’ve created a link to a post or article. The blue and the orange pieces of pie are great, the kind of incoming traffic everyone likes and really wants to encourage.

Trying to work out how to show adverts just to people who come Googling for free images, the green piece of pie, and not to anyone else, has been a tad tricky. There’s a plugin called Who Sees Ads and although more than 16,000 of them have been downloaded, my copy just doesn’t want to work, even after much frustrating wrangling.

So, I asked @peteashtonbecause I remembered some time back that he’d mentioned a way of filtering things so that regular visitors don’t see any adverts, which is what we want. What Would Seth Godin Do works on a cookie. It’s been set to show an advert panel containing a Google Adsense box above each post and each page. It’s there now. If you can see it, either you’re a first time visitor, or it’s your first visit since it was installed. Refresh the page, and it’ll be gone. For good and forever. The only time you’ll see the adverts again is if you log in from another computer, maybe at work, or perhaps from your phone, or if you have cause to clear your cookies. The second time, again it’ll be gone.

Of course if you read The Photography Pages via RSS there are no adverts, and there never will be any adverts on any of the feeds, ever.

It’s been a difficult few months: the studio and darkroom have cost a fortune, and travelling and whatnot, plus a couple of bills that aren’t being paid (more on that tomorrow). There probably won’t be much income, but it’s all going to help keep the darkroom going, pay the heating bills. The conscience is troubled, but not so much when the pennies will be only by dint of visitors who come looking for a free image bank.

So if you see an advert anywhere, just refresh the page. Whatever you do, don’t click on it. If it doesn’t disappear after a refresh, please do let me know. It’s an experiment, and hopefully only for a short time. Thank you.Similar Posts:

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There’s something rather romantic, heroic about a poacher. The idea that all that rolling land, all our rivers, are owned by someone, and usually by someone so disgustingly rich they eat and drink the kinds of foods never seen by their tenant farmers or any local villager, is pretty abhorrent, really. But when the poacher attempts to steal your minute little hard-won corner of the internet, it’s quite a different story.

The current issue involves a rogue admin which creeps in via some faulty code and sets up an invisible super-user account. Here’s the git wot got in here overnight:

If your pretty date/name permalinks have been changed at all, or you have any funny or unfamiliar code in them, check your subscriber list. ‘JesusWesson63′ there was an invisible admin. If you have an invisible admin, the count on your admin user page will be one more than the names of your own familiar real life admin people listed. Page through to your most recent subscriber, and add (or subtract) one number to the ID in the url, until you find something resembling the page above, and search for the name in your subscriber list, then delete the thing.

There’s more here and there will no doubt be plenty coming on WordPress itself and further advice appearing online as this thing progresses in the course of the next few hours.

Please let everyone know. Tweet them, and mail or text all your WordPress-using friends, especially if you think they only drop in on the internet at work during the week.

Many, many thanks to my uber-geek knitting collaborator Lisa @risager for her support and help this morning. I’m off to put on my combats and away to try and catch a trout.

Update:
There’s been an announcement from Matt Mullenweg at WP. It’s more detail on how this happened, and urges us to upgrade. Please pass on, and/or the url to this blog post and make sure all your friends know to upgrade to 2.8.4, and maybe offer help if you can.

Update #2
This morning I noticed a drop of about a 3rd in the count from Feedburner of people who read this blog via RSS. On checking the url in the plugin settings, it had been changed. Do check all your settings via the various menus before you assume all is well again, and good luck. Similar Posts:

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So I am going to give this another try.

This site’s running on 2.5 at the moment, and seems pretty much broken all over the place. If I upgrade to 2.7, allegedly it’ll have all the whizzbangs of the WP.com version, including making all future upgrades a one-click affair. Hah. We shall see.

Given that it has been impossible to kill this website over the almost six months of no posts – my visitor numbers have remained steady with incomprehensible peaks every now and again resulting in between 2-300 visits per day, I am sure this note will reach someone.

Quite who, though… ?

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Until recently, I adored WordPress. I’ve been teaching groups of artists and photographers to make websites and blogs using the free and easy WordPress.com package, which are so much the best offering out there to get going quickly. Magically easy, most of the templates are rather beautiful, and there’s enough customisation to make every site look different.

Then the first WordCamp UK came along, and in with the planning came enough cartoony controlling behaviours to begin a slow turnaround. Where were we women? Other halves, someone to do today’s equivalent of making the tea. As experts in our own fields, as co-workers in the big open source adventure? No. Ideas and suggestions were ignored, forum posts were skipped, and then fell under a welter of geek-talk and micro-chat. In the end, it proved impossible to go to the actual event, and probably that was a good thing, on balance.

But apart from a newly burgeoning UK community that seems to want autocratic geek hierachies, obsess about ways to increase traffic and the dreaded and ghastly monetisation, is WordPress itself broken?

In a matter of weeks since a major overhaul resulting in 2.5, version 2.6 has come out, and it seems that 2.5 is no longer being supported. Version 2.5 is okay, it mostly works, but the back end isn’t better organised or clearer than 2.3, and the image uploader is much worse. It hardly ever uploads a photo to a post first time, and often usually the code has to be typed in by hand. The much touted Gallery function, which would be marvellous on this site, doesn’t work properly either, looks ugly when it’s typed in, and the default links are all wrong, again with no way to change them except by typing.

The one function that is better in 2.5 over 2.3 is the ability to upload more than one image at a time. Is there anything else that’s better, really? If you can think of anything the Romans did for us WordPress does better in 2.5 or in 2.6, than in 2.3, please post it in the comments here. I’d love to know.

It takes some time to upgrade: all the plugins need switching off, backups need making and then it all needs putting back together afterwards. And there is always a plugin or an add-on that doesn’t work afterwards, since WordPress isn’t giving its developer community enough time to catch up. I have two blogs or three still on 2.3 which unfortunately have been dropped because there just isn’t time to upgrade them all.

And people are complaining about the feeds sometimes not working, and the templates are just well,  not being produced for 2.5 or 2.6. A clean 3 column with plenty of width in the main area is getting hard to find unless CSS faffing is in order, and that’s hardly the point of using a no-coding system.

But why Drupal?

Three years ago (a long time in blogland) me and one Mr Lunatic Fringe aka Phil Ackley from Anchorage, had a blog called Things That Moved. It documented visually and in writing, a host of broken down farm machinery, planes, and dead motor cars, interspersed with the occasional corpse. Beautiful rusting heaps and shiny disintegrating chrome, with smatterings of gore. Things That Moved was built on Drupal.

A long time ago WordPress was simpler, and Drupal was much more complicated. Daunting, even. Now, it just looks very beautiful so perhaps it’s time to give it another try.

And of course there’s Angie.Similar Posts:

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Posts to come include:

• an interview with Pierfrancesco Celada

• Answers to “Film or Digital?” and “Good membership organisations for early career photographers?”

• a review of Louise Taylor’s new exhibition in Newton Aycliffe.

• a look at Laura Goodman’s new series of photographs from squats at the NO:ID Gallery.

• news on progress with The Photography Place.

• scans of some darkroom prints, both conventional black and white and some lith prints.

• notes and future plans from the Graft Websites for Artists courses last weekend.

• reviews of the Ricoh GR film and digital point-and-shoot cameras.

.. and a whole lot more.

Back in a couple of days, folks. Be good.Similar Posts:

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We’ve finally transited: the awkward in-between stuff is over, and it’s time to build the content here. To paraphrase The (mighty) Who: here’s the new site, same as the old site! But with stability, few(er) outages, no 404s and on its own domain name.

We’re going to concentrate on photography news from the North-east of England, and occasionally from wider afield, plus reviews of local shows, interviews with early career photographers, short features celebrating photographers who influence our own work, especially those who still live in and photograph the region.

By region, we mean Teesside, Durham, Tyne and Wear, and Northumberland, with occasional forays into Yorkshire and Cumbria.

Planned posts include reviews of the local degree shows, a glimpse at the HCB in Bradford, The Ormerod Award 2008 prizewinner and a look to the future of a few of the region’s rising stars.

Please feel free to let us know what you’re up to. If we like your work, we’ll write about it.
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Seeking some bits of coding support: comments have gone from Pages (again), but there are other things. Comments on posts were b0rked earlier this evening, for example. It’s really heinous for people to have to fire up IE (ffs!) to be able to comment, isn’t it? A new template must be in order, but that’ll have to wait a couple of weeks while the work backlog gets whipped into a light froth with lemon topping.

A couple of us are looking at schemas for training for new WordPress users, and as a consequence were thinking of setting up a geek-skill-hub thingy for the times when n00bs mess up their templates and suchlike. Maybe some more sophisticated things, too.

If you fancy offering the occasional 10 mins to half hour of time once in a while, or if you know anyone else who could do the same, please sign up here.

Oh and what is the difference between a geek and a nerd? The question popped up in my RSS reader today. Hmmm. Geeks and geekery is definitely sexy though. Is a nerd a Star Trekkie?Similar Posts:

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A big thankyou to Josh who has hosted these sites for as many years as the wayback machine can remember, and who keeps a cool head and a quiet smile when everything around him is running wildly amok.

Recognised a fair few people at the Birmingham Blogger meet the other evening: watched the whole thing too. If you’re in there somewhere, please pipe up. Me and Mr Pete (a different Pete) will be keeping an eye on this pending our north-east artists’ website training starting later this month. There are quite possibly some uhm:

“accelerated synchronicities”

afoot!Similar Posts:

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Getting more requests for suggestions of shows and exhibitions to see, things to do in the north-east photography-wise, and Yahoo’s Upcoming service as used in the middle bar here, often slows the pageload, and is cumbersome and laborious to enter info. It’s okay if there’s a community of people adding events, but in the north-east, there just isn’t.

One possibility is a list using deli.cio.us links, but does anyone have any better suggestions, maybe a plugin or an easy-to-use feed mashup that doesn’t require writing CSS?Similar Posts:

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