Bytes and Bites of Internet
Wordpress
Sample data in WordPress … and beginning of new quest
Jun 15th
Recently, I got interested in WordPress theme designing. Actually I’ve been using WordPress now over 2 years and I’ve always wanted to create my own theme for my blog. Honestly I don’t have what they call … a designer’s eye 
… but still I wanted to try. I have been exposed from web designing using plain HTML ‘n CSS to server centric ASP.NET throughout my academic and professional carrier … so I think I will be atleast able to have theme for myself (this doesn’t mean that I am planning to change my carrier from App/DB developer to more cool web designer profession 
) … but all of this time, usually I was given a design (or atleast an idea) and then I have worked on this. This time I am having few ideas of my own which I wanted to convert in reality 
Anyways, today I have prepared myself for this quest. I have setup a WP development environment using XAMPP in one of my VM (it really pays off to have 16 Gig of RAM), I’ve gathered up all tools required for PHP editing (though I am completely noob at this point but WP has really extensive documentation so I hope that I will be just fine). I have even setup local instance of WP site which I will use as a guinea pig for my experiments (ok … before anyone gets wrong idea, I am vegetarian by nature and religion … and I totally disagree with any kind of experimentation on animals or humans … there … now I am feeling good already ).
Accessing XAMPP MySQL database remotely + locally
May 19th
This weekend, I was playing around with XAMPP which I am thinking to use for my quest to become familiar with WordPress development. For those who don’t know what the hack is XAMPP, it is cousin of WAMP and it basically provides development environment for PHP based applications (e.g. WordPress). It is basically combo package of essential modules like Apache, MySQL, PHP and few other add-ons (Mercury and Tomcat). Good thing about using packages like XAMPP or WAMP is when we install them they just configure all components to talk with each other so you don’t need to do any kind juggling for setting up each of those individual components before using them 
. On internet there are many walkthroughs available about to how to setup XAMPP, so I am not going explain that process.
But here in my case, I have a virtual machine where I have installed XAMPP and I wanted to access that MySQL database from my host system. Main reason for that is I never liked phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL instance and MySQL Workbench is by far very flexible and less confusing to use. I already have MySQL Workbench installed in my local system and I wanted to use that application to access database located in my virtual machine. I must say that if it was SQL Server it is very straight forward process but I didn’t expect that it will be really difficult to setup for MySQL ! Because by default use don’t have permission to access MySQL instance remotely and you have to configure server logins to have permissions to access database remotely. And may be I am wrong, but it looks like that users are bound with specific IP so that user has access to server only from that specified IP (or IP range).
Moving wordpress blog across Domains and Hosts …Yet another migration !!
Dec 29th
And finally after using free hosting / with free domain service for my blog, I finally thought to move to more “professional” place because my current free service limits me to number of files I can create !! and honestly, like any free lunch that doesn’t taste good … my domain name was sucker 🙂 … which was kind of main reason (though hosting and domain name has nothing in common) to move my blog here.
It is not that much of painful process as I was expecting in the beginning. Almost everything went seamless, so I am gonna write about it in this post.
NOTE: As being user of Computer you already know that for any given problem in computer “mostly” we have more than one solution. Same thing is for this migration process, it can be done more than one way. Here described process is what I have followed, but you may find more suitable method on somewhere else too !!
Step 1: Being “IT Guy” (sounds goooooood) I know importance of having backup incase if you want to fall back at any give time. Or just coz of bad luck something goes wrong and you mess up with something in your wordpress setup you may want to have an option to rollback by restoring GOOD copy. So, firstly backup your whole DB and WP files. To take backup from your WP database, the easy way was to login to phoMyAdmin app in my cPanel to WP Database. Once in go to select “Export” tab and make sure all tables have been selected and type is SQL.
Joining the Band !!!
Dec 1st
And yes … this is my very first post from my Android phone. In recent years these so called “smart phones” has really changed what we do online & on phone. Devices have become so powerful that once average PC was 😉 !!!
Actually I am really glad that this good folks (makers of wordpress ) have also made a great app for android which I am using ryt now to post this post … I hope that in future I won’t get this honor to post on my blog because I think one of the biggest dis-advantage of these smart phones is their keyboards. I really miss those big ,squezy keys who never feel bad if I sometimes press-hit hard ..
But I am using my phone instead of my machine because AVG Internet Security has literally caused BSOD on my Win 7 machine !!! I mean this is really heights of bad update for any software. Being old player in AV market I am really shocked … luckily I have dual booted my system with ol’ reliable linux so after this post I will dig more on net from that system or may be watch HULU and go to bed :-P…(
heyy, I have to keep track of missed episodes of my fav. series …
So I end here … More >
WordPress and Database Connection Error …
Nov 6th
This week, I changed my WP Blog password and DB Password for that blog as well. And I did it using control panel provided by my hosting service provider. It went all well without any sort of error or so. But just today when I was trying to access my blog for some past reference, with my surprise my blog was displaying “HTTP Error 500” aka Internal Server Error for my IE9 which made no sense to me … but then I fired up my Chrome/Firefox and browse my blog it was stating “Database Connection Error” … Which was kind of self explaining … I had messed up with the database connection setup.
And it is all because I assumed that when I change password for my DB of WP in control panel of Host, it automatically configures WP to make it use the newer settings … but I WAS WRONG … it actually doesn’t … changing password for DB at Host only gives access to WP to use that password to connect DB to use, but how will WP know that it has to use new password instead of new password ?? Because if you have setup the self hosting WP blog then you know that.. we store DB connection strings (passwords,DB name, DB Username, DB Server Name) manually !! So, we hard code the password for database as well. And naturally, the password update thing in host doesn’t update password in my configuration file of WP 
…
And now we have official WP 3.0.1 …
Aug 23rd
Well, I have been using WordPress 2.8.6 since I started blogging … and WP 3 got released some where during June 2010…since then it was telling me to upgrade to 3.0.1 but I was feeling lazy to do so because at first I thought its kind of ultra complicated process (and it is because I have not given access to WP to write, so no automatic upgrade) …
So yesterday night I was in mood to do something and I just thought that why not try to upgrade. So did some googling about the whole process and end up with WP help guide which gives step by step detail instructions to whole upgrade process …
Trying out Windows Live Writer Beta …
Aug 3rd
Well, this quick post is about just as this title says … its about new beta of Windows Live Writer. I have been user of Windows Live Writer since my early days of blogging. Perhaps it is the most convenient and free tool for blog writing. And just today I found that there is a beta available for new version of Live Writer so I jumped in and installed it.
First about the cosmetic changes …