John Carney

I think changing the permissions on the upgrade folder did the trick. I was able to upgrade a plugin automatically with no trouble. (I had already upgraded WordPress manually before reading this solution.) Thanks, everyone, for your input!

I have a WordPress blog installed on my TCH-hosted site. When I try to use the automatic update feature from within WordPress to update a plugin, or WordPress itself, it works forever and then gives me a message saying that it could not open the proper directory. Then, if I try to even look at my site for a few minutes after that, I get an error message saying that the site is "briefly unavailable for maintenance." I have the proper FTP information entered in WordPress. Is this a file permissions issue? Is there something I need to tweak?

I've just been setting up SMF this week myself. Please note that in order for the forum to mail anything to anybody, you have to plug your outgoing mail server details into Forum Configuration / Edit Features and Options. You can check your own profile by clicking on the "profile" button in the row of buttons a little bit down from the top of the page. It should say "administrator" for your position, and you can scroll down and see if your e-mail address is listed correctly.

I've done that -- and the times displayed in the blog itself are correct. But that setting apparently has nothing to do with the syndication feed.

I am running two WordPress blogs on my TCH account (one is in a subdomain). My main blog is listed with a Middle Tennessee-centric blog aggregator called "Nashville Is Talking," but I've noticed that it takes many hours or more for my posts to show up there, while other blogs with which I'm familiar have their new posts pop up right away. To make a long story short, I discovered that this is because the aggregator has a feature which does not add posts to the page until the current time matches the time specified in the syndication feed's timestamp. (This is to prevent someone from intentionally post-dating their posts as an attempt to artificially keep them at the top of the page.) The trouble is that, apparently, the post times in my syndication feed are UTC. I am not experienced with PHP, but I've tried looking at the wp-rss and wp-rss2 files in my WordPress setup. I even tried changing " +0000 " to " -0500 " in one of them and it didn't do anything. (I have changed everything back, and even went so far as to re-upload the original files in case I had made a mistake.) Has anyone else had this problem?

I may be looking in the wrong place, but I haven't seen any reference to the fact that the web browser Opera has changed their business plan. Until the latest version, there was a free-but-ad-supported browser and a paid-but-ad-free version. Now, the browser is completely free and ad free. The company apparently plans to make its money with service contracts and through the sale of related products. I haven't had much experience with Opera but I'm trying it out, now that it's free. http://www.opera.com

They have instructions at the site for adding one line to one file, as an alternate to downloading and upgrading the whole package:

I just updated. Thanks for the heads up!

Without having come here to read this thread first, I installed PHPBB this morning -- through CPanel. (It was a spur of the moment thing -- the group of people with whom I'll be taking a mission trip to Africa later this year needed a way to communicate.) Seems to be working fine.

Let me echo this. When I moved here a month or two ago, I used a similar process to import from Blogger into WordPress. But I'd never moved a domain name before, and my old web host's documentation was abysmal, the result being that it took a week or more before I actually got the new site up and running under the proper domain name. In the meantime, however, I had wrecked my old Blogger template while importing to WordPress and had not made a backup. So I really had no good way to make new posts to Blogger during that transitional period (at least, not without creating a new template, and I didn't want to go to that trouble, thinking all the while that I was just on the verge of getting the new site up and running). If I had simply kept a backup of the old template, I could have easily restored it and continued to blog at the old site while waiting for the new one.

On further review, I sort of misstated this. They do have a patch available for 1.1.4 (I missed that earlier), and they are still cautioning that 1.9.95 is beta software. I misunderstood something on the site earlier. Please forgive me for sloppy reporting. Anyway, I have downloaded 1.9.95 and it seems to be working fine for me.

I don't know if any of the rest of you use OpenOffice.org, the free open-source office suite, but if you do you might want to be aware of a new release. The software has been in beta testing for version 2.0. Because it's such a huuuuge download, and I'm on dialup, I was waiting for the final release, and I keep popping in to the web site every now and then to see if it's arrived. Anyway, there was apparently a security issue with the existing software (1.1.4) and they've decided to formally release a patched version of the 2.0 beta, listed on the site as version 1.9.95, to fix the security hole. (The "about screen" has the 2.0 beta graphics but lists the "official" version number as 1.9.95, and all of the installation programs refer to it that way.) I went ahead and downloaded this. You can get it from http://openoffice.org.

The term "image editor," in this case, is a little inaccurate. Irfanview is more of an image viewer. You can adjust things like the overall brightness or color balance of an issue, crop or rotate it, or save it in a different file format. But you can't work on particular parts of an image. That having been said, Irfanview is one of the most useful pieces of freeware on my computer. It's a quick-loading, no-nonsense way to view any image file, and it's very useful for converting, say, TIFs into JPGs or what have you. It's a must-have, as far as I'm concerned.

Done.

No, but I'd definitely have claimed him if he were kin. And I'm also not the NFL kicker John Carney, or the magician / standup comic John Carney, or the St. Louis radio personality John Carney.