Category Archives: WordPress

I never learn

Well, after a previous post where I mentioned I had to adjust various settings after deciding on a new Theme, and telling myself not to make large updates/uploads until the theme is settled… I went and did it again!

I found a shiny new theme, installed it and activated it and now some of the old bits no longer work and probably never will work in the same way again, so at least one of my mega image uploading sessions has been turned useless – doh !

At least the theme is nice and shiny.

Now for a few tweaks…

tsohost.co.uk

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have recently moved jartweb.net from a previous host, to its new location here at tsohost.co.uk . I moved because I wanted to experiment with some additional web technologies and I found that my options (at reasonable price) on the old host were very limited – no MySQL databases!! Pah!

I had a quick scout around online and then glanced at the back pages of PcPro magazine (the only IT mag I subscribe to now that PCWorld has gone the way of the 8-bit console) and I saw an add for tsohosts. The initial ‘TSO’ rung a bell back from my old University days when I used to have an account on Cambridge’s Phoenix mainframe (a box from IBM) and TSO stood for Time Sharing Operation. There were lots of commands starting with ‘TSO’ which could be used to make the machine dance, so I thought I’d have a quick glance around at this hosting company. What I found were some really good positive reviews and a pricing structure which looked attractive for the hobbyist ideas I had brewing. A fast response to my initial email had me reaching for my credit card.

I signed up and began the FTP download of the site from the old host and the upload to the new host. Apart from a few absolute links (tsk tsk), the site came alive almost immediately with no problems. I submitted a DNS change on the old host and slowly,overnight, the internet updated its servers to point to the new location. By midday the next day, the site had, to all intents and purposed, been moved. There was a minor hiccup in the evening when some DNS servers were a bit confused for a while and my email client kept trying to open the old address but with the new server’s password, but this resolved itself by the next day.

Adding this blog was simplicity itself – a couple of clicks in the cPanel, and there it was! Another couple of clicks and it had its own sub-domain. The only ‘gotcha’ was that I realised, after uploading and cropping tens of images for the header, that when I switched themes, the old header images were not directly compatible (wrong size) and the database that held their information had them registered in the old theme. I had to download them all, re-size in Photoshop, re-upload then edit the database (using phpMyAdmin) to set them to be in the new theme’s database. And voila! New theme, old images, working OK. Lesson to learn – experiment with small amounts first before committing to a theme and uploading tons of data to a theme specific database. But, that’s what this blog is all about for now – learning something new.