Category: wordpress

From Greendale.tk to WickedMessenger.net: A Domain Migration Story

About a week ago, I noticed something troubling—my old domain, greendale.tk, was no longer reachable. After a moment of confusion, it dawned on me: the registration renewal was up. The domain had been extended back in December 2023, and I’d completely lost track of time.

Here’s where it gets weird: you can still log into Freenom and see your domain listed there, but they’ve stopped sending renewal notices. The domains just… fade away into the digital ether.

Naturally, I did some digging and discovered that Freenom has been embroiled in legal troubles. They were sued and are facing serious financial difficulties—articles like this one and this one here paint a pretty clear picture. Their website still exists, but they’re no longer renewing or handing out domains. Somehow, I’d completely missed this news.

The silver lining? I still had wickedmessenger.net sitting unused in my portfolio. So I rolled up my sleeves and migrated the site—running some MySQL queries on the database, updating my information with Google, and adding the new domain to their search engine.

Not that I’m drowning in traffic these days. A few old LOST reviews still get the occasional visitor, and honestly, the golden days of blogging are long behind us. But this site remains something I treasure: a living archive documenting nearly 20 years of thoughts, interests, and moments in time.

So here’s to new beginnings: greendale.tk is dead—long live wickedmessenger.net!

Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 and Lightbox

Very fast affair through the admin interface ! Unfortunately it broke my lightbox jQuery implementation. I did manage to get it working again by using this lightbox 0.5 version and adding

jQuery("a[rel*='lightbox']").lightBox(); // Select all links that contains lightbox in the attribute rel

to my js init script. I might take another look at it soon, to get the other one working again as that was a bit better with grouping support…

Not quite sure what’s better about 2.8, I hope the mysterious WEBSTAT iframe injections will be gone, as that was a PITA with 2.7.1.

UPDATE: Managed to get this plugin to work. Edit the mainplugin php a bit as it’s no longer needed to de_queue the default jquery script. WP 2.8 comes out of the box with jQuery 1.3.2.

So this is what it looks like:

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
wp_enqueue_script('jquery-lightbox', $path.'jquery.lightbox.min.js', array('jquery'), '1.3.2');
wp_enqueue_script('jquery-lightbox-plugin', $path.'jquery.lightbox.plugin.min.js', array('jquery', 'jquery-lightbox'), '1.0');optical amplifier

Windows 7

Windows 7 RC1 will be released on MSDN on april 30th. There is a very nice review/ preview on the windows supersite. From my experience so far (from the public beta):  it’s very slick and snappy. The ui is a lot better too, especially the task bar. It stacks the programs in a much nicer way, and you can easily switch between windows etc.. But read the extensive review below for (much) more info .

But Windows 7, in release candidate guise, is already a towering achievement that casts Windows Vista immediately in its shadow.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 Site

Windows 7 RC1 Review

Ubuntu 8.10

So far the reviews and first impressions of the release candidate have been very good. It seems 8.10 will be even more smooth and snappier than the previous 8.04 release. Not going to bother with the RC, but will wait a few days for 8.10. Hope the upgrade process will be smooth !

WordPress 2.5 Gallery

Unfortunately this new feature doesn’t seem to work properly. First of all I had to make some changes to the .htaccess file on my blog to make the upload and crunching stuff work. Found that out after some digging in the wordpress forums. I can now see that the images are on my server, but they don’t show in the gallery anywhere. Not in the admin interface and not in blogposts :(. The paths to the images are very weird, so I think that’s why they don’t show up.

As I really had a few pictures to show, I decided to go with NextGEN gallery which worked fine. The upload images as one big zip file is very handy and as you can see in the link below, the gallery works wonderfully well.

Wowblog, Pics from this weekend

WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 has been released ! I upgraded my blogs to 2.5 and it seems to work fine. The admin part of wordpress has been overhauled, and the dashboard is now actually more useful. Although it takes some getting used to. The 4 most important functions (write, manage, design, comments) are more prominent and are displayed on the left, settings and plugings, users are on the right in a smaller font on the right. Only thing I dont like is the new write post page, the category selection is now below the write area, don’t really see why that was changed, though it’s not a big deal. At least it looks better.

I also think that wordpress 2.5 feels somewhat snappier, when loading pages etc. and on one blog (my warcraft one) a php out of memory that sometimes occured, has disappeared, so that’s good ;).

All in all a very nice upgrade I think. If you haven’t done so you might want to consider upgrading your wordpress installation as well !

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

Comparison between 2.3 and 2.5