WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog (Fix My Knee, a chronicle of my many knee surgeries). The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface.

I decided I should upgrade Tropical Blogging to the new version. Of course, I made sure I had backups of all the files, and a backup of the MySQL database, before doing anything.

I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, de-activated all my plugins per the instructions, followed the instructions to upload the files, and then followed the instructions to update the database. (Which basically consisted of clicking an “Update” button.)

All my posts were still there. But all the categories were missing! No, actually, they weren’t missing — they had numbers but no category names, and none of the posts were assigned to any categories.

I found a couple of posts on the WordPress support forum about this, but they weren’t any real help. The database structure had changed — there was no longer a “categories” table in the database. There’s a “category-to-tag” converter and a “tag-to-category” converter in the admin area, and I tried both, but neither one did anything.

I ended up manually re-creating each category, then manually assigning each post to appropriate categories. I almost just went back to my old WordPress installation, but I have this weird obsessions where once I start down a road I really hate to give up and go back.

I also discovered that my theme doesn’t work with this new version. It appears to work, initially — the home page of the blog loads just fine. But clicking any of the posts to “read more” results in an error. So I have to use a different theme, or get into troubleshooting that theme. Bah!

I’d like to update my clients’ WordPress-based blogs, but I sure don’t have time to muck around doing crap like that. For now I’ll take a pass. I hope WordPress addresses this issue, or those blogs will just forever have to be stuck on whatever version they’re currently runninng.

Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same. (Read on: Ethics and Web Design - The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer)

I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets. (Read on: Phishing and Phishing Detection)

Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money.

I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started. (Read on: Bad Hosting Costs $$ and Wastes Time)

The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.

(Read on: Correcting Bad Information)

The infamous Google spam czar Matt Cutts has fired another round at honest webmasters just trying to go about their daily work. In a recent blog post, He invited readers to report web sites buying or selling links that are not using the ridiculous nofollow tag on those links. Read: Google wants us to snitch on our colleagues. Turn them in. Rat them out. Become WWW stool pigeons for Google.

There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.

(Read on: No NoFollow, NoSnitching)

Microsoft is the master, but many, many programmers and software development companies are guilty. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had the most meaningless error messages pop up on my computer screen.

What set me off this morning? A client sent me a Word file. A simple, one-page Word file. I double-clicked it.

(Read on: Dumb Error Messages)

I just edited the files in my wordpress template to remove all traces of the rel=”nofollow” attribute from links in this blog. All links, including those in comments and signatures, are now your basic bog-standard “follow” links.

(Read on: No NoFollow)

For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed.

(Read on: Missing images)

What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization.

These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking.

(Read on: Web site development, SEO, and Hippocrates)