Only it didn’t work. WordPress 2.9 needs MySql 5.0 or higher. Crap. I had a 4.something MySql version. I went to the 1and1 control panel. No way to upgrade. No way migrate. S.O.L. When I had created my blog and the database for it, which didn’t seem like all that long ago, the default on 1and1 was to create a 4.x database. Now I was in trouble.

Hey, no problem I thought. I was told to do a backup before the upgrade, and I had done that. I used the phpMyAdmin tool to do the backup, I could do a restore to a new 5.x table the same way, right? Not exactly. I had a LOT of data in my database. 1and1 will only let you import 2meg. I had 4 times that. I needed to reduce some data.

I know, compression! First I tried to do the data dump with zip compression. Then I found out that the import tool didn’t support it. Sheesh. Then I tried the gzip compression. For me, this resulted in exactly the same file size. This wasn’t working at all. I just need to get rid of some data.

First I created a new 5.x MySql table using 1and1.

Next, I thought that I would eliminate some cache data that I didn’t really need. I use a flickr plugin that caches a lot of data. Also, I use a twitter plugin that stores all the tweets I make there. This adds up! So I decided to delete the data. The plugins didn’t have a delete function, so using phpMyAdmin, I went to the sql tab and entered the following command:

TRUNCATE TABLE tablename;

Replace tablename with the flickr or twitter, or what ever table you need to remove all rows from. Doing it this way instead of deleteing rows is much faster.

Still too much data. Hmmmm… how about all the revisions. I never need to go back to the revisions I had before, so lets delete them:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

That’s working pretty well. I am down to 3.5meg. Still not near the 2meg limit though.

There is now a time consuming way, and an easy way. The time consuming way is if you are afraid of the command line. You can download a backup file, open it in a text editor (not word), chop it into pieces, and upload these pieces, hoping you don’t make a mistake. Or, you can do a little command line magic. Just a couple of lines.

First, you need to use ssh to get into your 1and1 account. From a Mac or Linux box, this isn’t too difficult. It is built right in. From a windows machine, you will need to use a program called putty. I use a Mac, so I will show you the command line (Terminal) commands to use. First you need to find out the URL, userid, and password to use. If you go to the Administration panel, select “Web Space & Access”, and then “Secure Shell (SSH) Access”. Here you will find the URL, user and password to use.

ssh userid@sxxxxxxxx.onlinehome.us (or what ever your URL is)

Then enter your password at the prompt.

Now you are in your 1and1 shell account. Now, lets save a backup of our database without the phpMyAdmin tool.

mysqldump -h dbxx.perfora.net -u dboxxxxxxxx -p dbxxxxxxxx > backup.20100101.sql

Give your file a date so it is easy to remember what the backup is from.

The -h part is for host. The -u for user. The -p is prompt for password, then the last part is the database.

That command will take a few seconds depending on how big your database is. Isn’t is weird that 1and1 will let you have a 100meg database, but your can’t use any of their tools to import something that big?

Ok, now lets restore that data into a new 5.0 database that you created. Make sure you use the new database for this command.

mysql -h dbxxx.perfora.net -u dboxxxxxxxx -p dbxxxxxxxx < backup.20100101.sql

Again, this will take a couple of seconds, and then you are done. That’s it.

Ok, I have to confess. I did this the hard way the first time. I thought the text after the -p was my password, instead of the database name, and I couldn’t get the command to work. This way is much easier though. Trust me.

Now, remember why I was doing all this? I wanted to upgrade my WordPress install. So next I went and edited my wp-config.php file to the updated database info. I have no idea what happened, but after I edited this file, my WordPress site became all text, and just dumped out this file to the browser. Oops. So I then deleted the file, and started the install over again. (That’s what happens if the file is missing) I entered the database info and then got a message about an existing install. Yea, yea, I know, so I exited out, and just went to the site normally, and everything was fine. Phew. Not sure what to tell you, as that was a little bit more stressful than I thought I would be.

Next I logged in, went the the dashboard, gleefully passed the screen telling me to backup, and upgraded to 2.9 in a couple of seconds. Piece of cake.

This is a pretty cool site. It has just about everything. Well, actually, a lot of the content is an agregation of other content, so they have stuff like 40 cool abstract and background photoshop tutorials,  60 useful photoshop actions, 41 great looking free wordpress themes, and so on. There is a lot of content collected here.

There is material here on photoshop, wordpress, icons, backgrounds, and more. A lot of is is more “design” and “photo-retouching” related, but it seems like I will spend some time here looking around.

I have been working on a gallery with Zen Photo with my Cyberward theme. Still trying to decide what I want to do with it, but I think that I will move to migrate my family photos over to Zen Photo instead of Gallery.

Zen Photo just seems better in my opinion. Gallery (actually Gallery2) seems slow and burdened. Too many things activated and going on by default.¬† Zen Photo has fewer plugins, but that’s ok by me. It seems much easier to hack on too. I guess now I just need to time to do this.

Gavin today called me a “very nice man.”¬† Also that I¬†was a¬†”geeky Canadian”. We Canadian programmers take that to be the highest compliment. ¬†I was quite tickled. It is great when you get to create something that someone really wanted, and doubly when they go out of their way to say thank you.

I am glad that it is what he was looking for. I hope to make some improvements and options for display in the future, but will keep the “title” display¬†that works now.¬†

If you give it a try and have issues or suggestions. Leave a comment on the CwExif plugin page.

This is just the first version. There is much more that I want to do with this plugin, but you have to start somewhere.

Get it here.

The first iteration of the plugin will simple replace the title of the image (displayed on hover) with the some meta data captured by WordPress. This will be things like f-stop and shutter speed. Eventually I would like more data, but I will have to go outside of WordPress to get it. Second, I will need to beef up the display options. Using the title is not what I wanted. I would like to have a hover give a proper note, or a click with a lightbox effect. I will get to those later.

So, the first release of this plugin will be soon. I have it working within the media library, but when you are adding an image, the admin panel uses a pop-up with a different form. I just need to get it working either way.

Here is the exif data when you put this tag in your post: [lameda_exif id=556]

The thing with this, is you still have to go into the post html and find out what the wordpress id of the image is. Still a bit of a pain. I like that it is pulling this from wordpress. Looks like wordpress stores this in the post_metadata table in an entry about the image. Not all data is saved, just some of the more basic ones like those shown. We just need a more automated, and visually appealing way to show it.

[exzo url="" title=""]dsc_0021[/exzo]

That will get you this image on my site:

Most of the styling and which exif data that shows up is all customizeable. But I have a couple of issues. First, there seems to be an issue in the plugin where is doesn’t reference the zoom.css file. I had to modify exzo.php to point to it correctly. Second, the included lightbox effect isn’t so hot. The biggest issue is that the image pops up full size. Other versions I have seen try to scale the image for the viewport.

It does look like you could opt to just show the exif data though, like this :

[exif="dsc_0021.jpg"]

What would be really neat is if instead of the formatting of the picture, and the need to use this tag, is if via javascript, it could just attach itself to the image and display on a hover, or a click or something. Hmmm… that would be interesting…

The theme is working fine now. There were a few things I needed to do. First was fix up the comments. The new wordpress supports threaded comments, but my theme did not. Now it does. Also, Pages didn’t allow comments, and didn’t show when the page was created which I wanted. Oh yea, I added gravitars, the little pictures beside the posters post.

I switched the download plugin as noted earlier, and that was a big pain. When I tried to get it running on the updated site, I couldn’t activate the plugin. In the end I found out that it must have been corrupted files in the file transfer. I reinstalled it from a new zip, and reapplied my changes, and now it works.

So… the only thing really missing is the images at the top of the page. I really need to get those updated. With the gap there, it kinda looks like crap.

While playing with this plugin I discovered a bug. I couldn’t update/save the attributes for a file. I was trying to assign a custom icon, and the display name, but nothing would stick. Hunting this down I found out why php debugging, especially ajax calls really sucks. Anyway, I finally discovered what the issue was; a variable that was not initialized. It must be the particular combination of WordPress (2.7), PHP(4.5), and MySql(5.0) that I was playing with, because I can’t belive that this doesn’t work for everyone that uses this plugin.

Turns out that the developer has a tracker, so I created a bug with my solution. I am going to be moving to this from the Download Manager plugin I was using.