DeepWave

Phew! What a day!

I must admit, there were times when I was sitting nervously in front of my PC, wondering if things were going to be OK, or if I would end up wiping out several hundred MB worth of online web data. Of course I have backups! But even with backups, it is still scary when performing major surgery on a website..

Anyway, I have since upgraded WordPress from 2.0.5 to 2.3.1, and at the same time, changed and updated various plugins and so on and so forth. Upgrading the WordPress itself was a breeze. I also used the Maintenance Mode plugin to lock people out until I was ready to have them back in. Since was was going to redo all the plugins and themes, I just threw away most of the wp-content folder, and just upacked the new WordPress. Copied over the wp-config.php file, run the upgrade program, and boom, website is back online. Then I added all the plugins, themes and widgets, enabled them and spent some time configuring them for their various options etc. All this, I did for both DW.Net and for Route 901.

Then came the really scary portion. I decided to change the DB collation type from the default latin1/latin1_swedish_ci to UTF-8. Luckily, I had the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin from g30rg3_x to help me. Now, the plugin has very scary warning pages saying it doesn’t support WP 2.3.1, and you can lose all your data, yadda, yadda, yadda. However, I was already completely out of my mind by the time I reached this point, and said, “F* Me!” and hit “Go”…

I was incredibly lucky, and  everything worked. All the pages, etc were still there, and nothing was lost.

That was when the sky fell down. All the graphics from the MyGallery plugin was missing. It seemed that the gallery information and images were all still there and correct, but it kept looking for an “a” folder in the URL. I tried to go look in phpMyAdmin and see if there was a problem with the table data, thinking maybe I could edit the fields by hand. No luck, the database looked OK. Fearing the worst, I was about to go hacking around in MyGallery code to see where the problem was, when on a hunch, I decided to try disable the MyGallery plugin, and re-enable it. Wah-lah, what do you know, it worked. I just needed to resetup and reconfigure the MyGallery plugin and everything was back to normal.

After that, it was a matter of  editing tags, rechecking post/page data and so on and so forth. But, basically, things were back to normal. So, here we are, with DeepWave.Net 4.1 - do check out the new Serene Theme and the updated Hide Dashboard plugin - both of which are being released at the same time and used at this site.

It should be noted that the site upgrade also owes its success to one key unsung hero: XAMPP Lite.

The entire upgrade process and all themes, plugins and widgets was tested and rehearsed on my Windows PC before a single modification was made to the live server. This rehearsal even included real live database data from the server imported into the XAMPP test environment. I am happy to say that thanks to XAMPP, the upgrade process was smooth and generally uneventful except for the one problem with the UTF8 conversion and MyGallery plugin.

Conclusion: All’s well that ends well, and hello to widgets, tags and shoutboxes!

So I finally imported Eileen’s Blog from Friendster into WordPress. WordPress’ import function was absolutely painless! Then she says to me "Hey, stop reading my blog, it’s private!" and I’m like "Duh, it’s on the Internet you know…" Sigh…

Well, in three days I have setup a blogging / CMS system on a new web host and moved over 120 pages of static content and almost 400 images, files and data. All I can say is, PHEW!

Certainly, this is not the end of the site activity. I still have various things I want to do, like changing the header graphic for the Connections theme, create a Links page of sorts, note down the various changes, hacks and modifications I had to do to get the site running and, of course, start adding more content.. I will also be trying to see if I can migrate Eileen’s Friendster blog to this one, so that will be a technical challenge as well.

And of course, hopefully I will be adding more and more content to DeepWave. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the content, right? Always has been..

Well, looks like the move is almost over.. I registered the DNS change with Network Solutions at about 18:00 GMT+8, and within 3 hours later, my own ISP here in Singapore already has the DNS record updated.. Now that is incredibly fast for a DNS update!

In any case, I’ve moved all the pages etc over, and now only have the Gallery left, and hopefully I’ll get that next. I also want to setup a link page of some kind to add links to other people..

I tried the PHP5, but there seems to be some problem with it. I’ve submitted a ticket to ASO (who have been fantastic so far), and we’ll see.. Anyway, PHP4 is working, so it is not like it is something very urgent..

Other that that, things are Looking Good ™.

OK, so, now I’ve finished moving probably everything except the Gallery.

1. the Credits section in the About,
2. all of the Articles and References,
3. more Light Reading
4. the entire Gallery
5. the Contact page
6. check out conversion to PHP5 (tried it, but will try again after DNS move is complete)
7. move the domain
8. search and replace the entire WordPress DB to make sure the URLs are properly updated after the domain move
9. re-setup the Frees mailing list
10. and make sure Eileen’s Blog is working fine. Oh yeah, and teach her HOW to blog using WordPress…

So, I am now going to move the DNS, and hopefully everything will work out fine..

Well, it is really late now, I’m tired, having been setting up, and moving pages from the old server to this new WordPress / MySQL CMS / Blogging system. So far, I’ve completed moving the About, Press and Events and some of the Light Reading. So, what’s next on the to-do list:

1. the Credits section in the About,
2. all of the Articles and References,
3. more Light Reading
4. the entire Gallery
5. the Contact page
6. check out conversion to PHP5
7. move the domain
8. search and replace the entire WordPress DB to make sure the URLs are properly updated after the domain move
9. re-setup the Frees mailing list
10. and make sure Eileen’s Blog is working fine. Oh yeah, and teach her HOW to blog using WordPress…

Phew!

DeepWave.Net started out as a personal web page way back in 1993. It was hosted on my university’s Sun and NeXT servers. During those days, NCSA’s Mosaic was the sole premier web browser. It was plain as web pages go, but later, there was an experiment called WIF - WebInterFace. WIF was designed to build an application entirely based on a web page and using Javascript to provide the necessary user interaction. Unfortunately, WIF had some serious bugs in it with Javascript on Netscape 2.x and Macintosh Netscape.

In 1997, the entire site was re-released as the Andromeda Express and was well supported in Netscape 4.x. In July 1998, the Andromeda express was re-released as version 2.1 at its new home at DeepWave.Net.

Eventually, with a Perl-based site management tool called the Web Pre-Processor, DeepWave.Net was re-released yet again as version 3.0 in December 1999, with some significant changes in the design of its user interface.

At the end of 2006, a long overdue makeover for DeepWave.Net was finally implemented. This involved a complete switch to using an excellent Blogging/CMS tool called WordPress.

Welcome to Version 4.1 of DeepWave.Net!

One must always give credit where credit is due, and so, after maintaining raw HTML pages with text editors, and later with Perl, DeepWave.Net now uses a whole bunch of software and tools created by other people. So, here’s the list of major items used at DeepWave.Net:

WordPress
This is the core CMS / Blogging system I use. It is easy to setup and maintain
and it looks pretty good too.

Serene Theme
I use my own Serene Theme for the site.

Cleaner Gallery and Lightbox 2
Of course we want our pictures to look great right?

Email Obfuscator
See also news://alt.spammer.die.die.die

Feeds Widget
Easy to use RSS Feeds Widget.

NRS Folding Pages Widget
Shouldn’t this be included by default?

Google Analyticator and Google XML Sitemaps Generator
I am Google-d, Therefore I am…

Hide Dashboard
A small plugin I wrote to simply Hide the Dashboard from the Admin Menu
for anyone logging in who is not an Admin.

Search Everything
Why this is not the default in WordPress, I have no idea.

Simple Tags
Great add-on, for a great feature.

Underscore Permalinks
Because underscores are cooler than dashes?

UrlEncoded Permalinks
Just in case…

WP Spam-Free
More Anti-Spam, one can never have enough of this stuff.

WP AJAX Edit Comments
For the really nice comment F/X

WP Contact Form III
Short, sweet, to-the-point contact form - what we all need

And of course, the default Akismet plugin that comes with WordPress.

DeepWave.Net is hosted at: