Well, tonight, after a LONG day of work after taking a week’s rest (vacation… staycation - whatever you call getting up at 3 pm and REALLY resting a lot!)… I decided to upgrade to the latest WordPress. Easy enough using Fantastico. Well, I went through the process, then saw something like “as long as you didn’t change any of the themes, etc.”

I had clicked already. Ouch! That meant having to re-do all of the customizing on this blog… And since I’m tired already, it could take WAY longer than it did in the first place.

Well, somewhere I saw something about Fantastico backups… Could it be? Not a chance. Could it?

Well, it turns out that Fantastico is as fantastic as the name suggests!!!

If you need to find an archived file of a page that has to do with a script or software you installed using Fantastico, you might be in luck!

First, make a backup of any files on the server (you never know if there will be problems with the files you’re about to upload).

If it’s WordPress…

In your FTP program, go to your root directory (not publichtml or wherever your public files are but one directory higher). Look for a directory called something like fantasticobackups.

There should be a blog-related file there.

Download it and unzip it. It will contain files, some with multiple versions… find the most recent versions of the files you need to change. Save them.

Upload them to the directory where they’re supposed to be (likely something like public_html/wp-content/themes/[theme name]

You might have to re-upload any pictures used by your blog.

You should be good to go.

Phew!

Now I can go to bed!

Laconica is the open source Twitter-type software that, in the past week, has been attracting TONS of attention… Many people (including myself) have been working on or thinking of putting together a microblogging script… Looks like Evan (the co-founder of http://www.identi.ca) has been able to get one running, and it’s turned out to be a pretty great program!

The issue many developers are having, though, is how to get the thing installed… I searched at the end of last week with no success. Today, already I’ve found a few resources. So here goes…

To get the laconica files in the first place:
http://laconi.ca/Main/Source

If you’re using DreamHost, you might be in luck.

A few articles talk specifically about installing Laconica, if your hosting company is DreamHost.

Installing PEAR on dreamhost.com has information on installing PEAR and his follow-up article Laconi.ca successfully installed on dreamhost has information about actually installing Laconica on there with some warnings before installing!

Another DreamHost-related article: Got Laconi.ca installed on my DreamHost account is pretty well detailed and interesting.

Hosting somewhere else? Or your own server?

If you’re hosting anywhere besides Dreamhost, you’ll this is the place to go:

0xDECAFBAD’s article Getting Laconica up and running is a great article, and the comments from both the developer community and Evan, the developer of the Laconica software himself, can definitely help out.

As people are adding Laconica information regularly, I’ll post again as I find other interesting resources.

Good luck!

ADDED:

2008/07/11 @ahynes1 has some great documentation at Orient Lodge starting with a sort of basic step-by-step guide, and followed up by a couple of posts with updates. Great stuff there!

2008/07/14: The main Laconi.ca site has added installation information including the tables that need to be altered/changed when updating from an older version.

Also, there are two scripts to install Laconica on DreamHost on Gimme Soda.

2008/10/28: Just found a great step by step post about installing Laconi.ca.

There are basically five steps:

1. Open up a new hosting account and copy your files.

Keep your old one active for now. The reason for this is that you’ll be recreating your site on the new Web hosting company’s server. They’ll likely give you an IP address (a number something like 111.111.11.1 to start uploading and test it out on). Then, test the site - try all kinds of combinations - click on links, than click other links to move around the site. If it’s a relatively small site, you should be able to test all of the links to make sure everything’s working.

This is often a good time to do a bit of a cleanup in your directories as well. If you start by making a copy of the directory that holds the Web site content on your hard drive, just upload what you need. Then, get rid of any files you don’t need anymore (if you need those files, you’ll have them in your original directory).

2. Transfer your domain to the new web host.

When everything’s working right and you’re ready to transfer your site, you’ll need to make a change to the name servers (sometimes referred to as DNS) for your domain. Ask your new Web hosting company what their name servers are for your site.

They’ll often have them on the site, or the technical support department will be happy to give you the server names.

Once you’ve got them, you have to update them with the domain registrar. Contact, or visit the site of the company that registered your domain. If you’re not sure who registered your domain, you can go to http://www.netsol.com and do a “whois” search. They’ll tell you which company the domain is registered with, or if it’s registered with themselves (Network Solutions).

Head to the site of the company that registered your domain. In some cases, you can log in to an administation area to update them, in some cases, you’ll have to send an e-mail.

3. Confirm the changes to the domain.

The domain registrar will usually send you a message to confirm the change. Make sure you read it carefully to see if you need to approve anything.

4. Wait for propagation.

Once your domain is switched over (usually a couple of days), don’t go close down your old account right away. Wait a week or so, until all ISP’s have switched over to the new name servers. This can take a few days and you risk, if you switch too quickly, you risk some users not being able to reach your site at all ofor a few days.

To find out if the new site is loading, you can make a small change to the site (add a word somewhere in a sentence, or change a sentence slightly) when you upload the new site at the new Web hosting company. This way, when you load it, you’ll know which Web host it is going to, but your users won’t see any difference.

5. Close down the old account.

Once you’ve waited a bit and you’re happy that everything’s working well, close down the old account. It’s taken some work, but hopefully the results pay off (whatever the reason you switched, better price, better service, better features, etc.).

Go out and buy yourself a pizza to celebrate your hard work!

The concept behind server-side scripting is pretty simple. You have a Web site (in HTML). You create a database. Then PHP (or other programming language you choose) is the go-between from your site to the database. For example, if you have a real estate listings Web site, and a visitor to your site is looking at the listing for a property at 123 Main Street. You would use PHP to go to the database and retrieve the information like number of bathroooms, number of rooms, price, etc. Using a blend of HTML and PHP (well CSS and Flash can come into the picture too but we’ll keep it simple), you can make the page look exactly as you want it, and when changes are made to the database, the page will automatically be updated for any future visitors to the page. Phew. I hope you’re still with me.

If you know HTML, learning PHP, though not learned completely overnight, isn’t that difficult.

And most hosting accounts offer it as part of the basic package. So if you’ve got an account already, you can start adding PHP features to your site right away.

Some sites to help you get started at learning PHP are:

PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute Beginner
This 15-part set of tutorials will start you off with one called “Down the Rabbit Hole” which starts with the equivalent of a Hello World program - traditionally, the first thing you learn when programming a new language is learn to write “Hello World” on the screen - if that works, it makes you feel good because you got something to work, and it starts to show you the specifics of programming in that language at the same time. Does this all make sense? I’m still waking up.

Anyways, going through the tutorials, you’ll know how to put together a Web application (poll) and even an RSS news aggregator.

The W3Schools PHP Tutorial
I’ve always found the W3Schools tutorials as better references if you’re looking for something specific than one where you use to learn from scratch and move forward. Not sure why that is, but it’s been like that for years for me. It’s got some great information about all kinds of PHP functions, not to mention information to help you freshen up your other Web skills (CSS, etc.).

It’s also got a very complete section on MySQL which is likely the type of database you’ll use with your PHP site.

PHPBuddy
I just found this site today and I love it! It’s got a simple layout, looks really easy to understand, and start your off with easy projects, to then move you forward in your PHP learning journey. Yes, I said it… PHP learning jouney. Sounds nice and peaceful, huh?

Ok on to the next one…

PHP Learn-It!
Walks you through writing to databases, reading databases, cookies, and the most interesting part of it to me, being a more advanced tutorial but definitely useful to anyone using PHP in the long run, a tutorial to save and edit the database using AJAX. You’ll understand more about AJAX and what it can do as you develop more and more Web sites but basically, in his case, it can let you make changes on a page and to the database, without having to reload the whole page - like when you’re posting a comment on YouTube and it saves your comment, without reloading the whole page and starting the whole video again. Don’t get the point? No problem, you likely will one day.

PHP Video Tutorials
I hadn’t planned on adding any sites that charge a fee. I like free stuff. But this one’s interesting enough to get my attention and make me consider using in the future. I’ve never used it so I have no idea of the quality of the videos or the information… But I like the fact that they walk you through it - they mention that you code each line as they do… So by the end of the lessons, you have a site that’s basically ready to go. It’s about $10-$15 per lesson to build a whole site.

Oh wait, I had almost missed it. I know I sound like an informercial (”wait! there’s more!”) but it’s not one of those things. I just got sort of excited for a minute… I just noticed the free videos. So there ya go, you can see how it is.

And in case this is coming across like a bit of an ad, please note that I AM NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY OF THE SITES IN THIS ARTICLE. So there.

In closing…

The great thing about PHP and HTML is that you can program them in whatever tool you have available. On Windows, Notepad will do the job. You save the files as .php and you’re good to go.

In the next few days, we’ll look at tools to help you program PHP.

I hope this helps a lot of you out!

Thanks for visiting the blog. We hope it will be useful to you!

You’re not a developers? Don’t worry, you’ll find fun stuff on here too!