When you have to sign a liability disclaimer, you know that the person or corporation you are dealing with knows you are about to do something risky and wants you to assume all the risk.

So having to sign a liability disclaimer (in this case, done by clicking a checkbox) before I could upgrade my installation of Wordpress on my website filled me with a sense of foreboding that quickly morphed into a full-blown cry of alarm. Not that I don’t approach these occasions with a healthy dollop of anticipation anyway. Any change of software anywhere is an invitation to disaster. We all know this in our heart of hearts.

But I couldn’t remember having to take this step whenever I upgraded my Wordpress installations via Fantastico. If Simple Scripts was such a great replacement for that now-outmoded stalwart, why did I suddenly have to sign a liability disclaimer? What did Bluehost know that I didn’t?

Well, for one thing, Simple Scripts is Bluehost’s own product. That fact seemed well disguised, but after all, this is the Internet we’re dealing with. The information is out there, you just have to look.

So my Internet Service Provider (or web host) is now asking me to assume full responsibility for using something they not only developed, but also gave me no alternative to using. It wasn’t like they said, go ahead and use Fantastico if you want, but in that case you have to sign a liability disclaimer; we trust our Simple Scripts product with our lives.

No.

It was, you have to use Simple Scripts—it’s your only choice—and oh, by the way, we’d like you to sign this little disclaimer saying we are not liable for anything that goes wrong, without which you can’t proceed.

Meanwhile, I was overdue to upgrade to Wordpress 7.1.

Now, I don’t rush to be first out of the chute with any particular upgrade. Indeed, past experience as a developer has made me loathe to upgrade almost anything that isn’t so buggy I can’t stand to continue using it anyway.

Favorite features tend to disappear; new ones I hate become troublesome. Sometimes it’s just that the new look and feel doesn’t seem as friendly to me as the old one.

And always, there’s the fear that some troublesome new monster bug will emerge to make you rue the day you pushed that Upgrade button.

So I like to let new versions mature a bit and check the  blogs occasionally to see if there’s any uproar.

Not that I’ve ever specifically had a problem with upgrading Wordpress. But you never know. No matter how much testing’s been done, I like to give everyone a chance to get the bugs out before I proceed.

But now I was ready. Betas of 2.8 were already beginning to appear and I hadn’t upgraded. Not only that, I was still at WP 6.5—a couple of upgrades behind. So I was getting anxious.

The upgrade on this site went without a hitch. The upgrade on Spotless Form went without a hitch. And so on.

But when I went to  upgrade Health Spectator, Fantastico took me as far as it could. Bluehost had decreed no more Fantastico beyond this point.

And when I switched to using Simple Scripts, the new wonder of wonders, it simply declared there was no such Wordpress installation.

I wrote the Bluehost  Support Team as follows:

I was a bit dismayed to find out that Fantastico is no longer the method of choice to upgrade my versions of Wordpress for my blogs. However, I have managed to muddle through the conversions/upgrades for a few of my sites.

With Health Spectator, though, I have a problem. The Simple Scripts screen cheerfully informs me (below):

http://healthspectator.com/wordpress/
This installation does not exist!

Note that the healthspectator installation of Wordpress (which I believe was my first) is installed in a /wordpress/ subdirectory, unlike [some of] the installations on my other sites. This may account for Simple Scripts informing me that the installation does not exist.

I can assure you that it does, and I can access the site okay. But that doesn’t help me convert the Fantastico installation to Simple Scripts or proceed with the upgrade. I believe my current healthspectator.com installation is WP 2.65, which Fantastico was kind enough to handle for me. However, having been upgraded that far, it no longer shows up in the Fantastico panel and (as I’ve already said) Simple Scripts insists that it doesn’t exist.

How should I proceed?

Truly yours,
Bill Suydam

To which someone at Bluehost wrote back:

I believe wordpress has a plugin you can install that will help you update the site. Before we cant [sic] take a further look into this we need validate the account with either the password on the account or the last four on the credit card. Thank you.

Thank you,
Matt
Technical Support Engineer

So I sent them the last four digits of my credit card.

And eventually got this response:

Unfortunately we are in the same boat as you are. The only way I can think to make it usable in the future is to back it up. Delete it, and then create a new wordpress for it, and restore to it. You could try and move the folder and then change the links to match, but that can be tricky and usually something is missed or forgotten.

Also, please make sure you have a good backup of all of your sites. Better yet, make sure you have at least 2 backups.

Thank you,
Van
Technical Support Engineer

So glad I asked.

I still haven’t re-installed FireFTP, since I’m still happy with Filezilla when I need ftp, but I can report that on the new Vista machine we have in our office, Firefox has been the least of our problems. I’m running 2.0.0.5 with different extensions for different users, and so far it’s been running rock-solid.

Thought I’d better set the record straight for anyone who saw the earlier posts.

During the design phases of Techismo, for example, I spent a lot of time developing styles in CSS, coding HTML, and perfecting Javascript routines to help me with collapsible menuing systems and navigational themes. When it came time to begin production, I was still tweaking these themes across browsers. Those issues, combined with a little real-life complexity, led me to hold off plans for a launch of what I would call Techismo the magazine, but I did nevertheless pound out an occasional episode of what I think of as Techismo the blog.

Meanwhile, choosing the same blog design for this site quickly proved a form of compromise, given that the originally intended subject was one that lent itself more to a page-oriented developmental approach, since so much of what I planned to discuss was issues in design and implementation of actual, functioning web pages. As detailed in an earlier post, I chose Wordpress as my blog vehicle, and as recent readers of these pages will be well aware, I chose to use the default theme, Kubrick, at least while I learned the ropes.

Of course, the blogs soon took on lives of their own, at least in terms of interests, since I soon found myself reporting on the legal, political and economic issues confronting us as users of technology, whether that technology be the latest in web technologies or streaming music. That was within the pages of Techismo, of course, where I found the vicissitudes of Internet radio a compelling issue in itself, not to mention its ramifications for pieces I had planned and even written on subjects such as streaming radio and hardware devices.

Through all this, my abandoning painstaking page design to become a novice at what I regarded as sort of a page-generator package (Wordpress) was both a source of frustration and of relief. Frustration because I felt removed from the design process that I considered an organic part of writing for the web; relief because it essentially freed me from those frustrations, particularly as they concerned cross-browser compatibility (though not completely) and enabled me at least to focus on writing.

I was delighted therefore, when I began to look around a bit at alternatives that might free me from the self-imposed Wordpress constraints that I had taken on much as a Buddhist monk might declare a vow of chastity. I found a few ready-made themes that held promise, some because they gave me three columns readily, others because they achieved a level of elegance in design itself that was both exhilirating and refreshing.

While I hope to talk about all of these in future installments, for the moment I am delighted to report my experience in the remaking of Health Spectator as a more mature product, at least in its presentation and packaging. So far, for that purpose, I have chosen the theme Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs, a Belgian developer with Mindloop, while considering others such as Bob’s Big Blue and Chris Pearson’s Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1; even a few themes from plaintext, such as Scott Allan Warwick’s Barthelme, which you (most likely) see here. I say, most likely because I have been flipping back and forth between Barthelme and Bob’s Big Blue for this site. Barthelme is I think, by far the cooler, while Big Blue gives a genuine 3-column layout and feels customizably homey.

So, for the moment, Health Spectator is stunned out in Feather 1.0 with a few of my own modifications, while this blog and Techismo are heading towards Barthelme. Actually, for Techismo I have been downright experimenting with Sandbox, a cruder-looking quantity right out of the box, but readily customizable just with CSS. I already find myself enchanted.

So however briefly, I’m at least getting to experience the joy again of getting my fingers into the code and making it do what I want, standing on the backs, as I do it, of other good designers.

A death in the family, other examples of life—see our first post—and almost nothing goes as planned. Still, it’s all been exhilarating, and I find new things to write out of it, if not the sorts of things I was intending to write when all these things happened.

From the first, this site (still simply a blog) was intended to be a running commentary on what I discovered while working on other sites. It so happens that back when I first got the idea to produce it, I was conducting a lot of testing and intensive coding rather than simple posting, so a lot of the work I was doing at the time seemed worth sharing with others. And still does—if only I can get back to it.

Since then, however, my concerns have been more from a practical end-user perspective as I have attempted to make steady enough posts on at least one site (Health Spectator) so that a sense of presence can be established. That’s where Lennon’s reference to life as what happens while you’re making plans came in.

My wife had been supporting all these efforts not only with encouragement, but by keeping the wolf away from the door (though he could be heard howling, not too distant). Then, through a bit of beautiful corporate double-cross, she found herself out of work.

Then her mother died. This was not entirely unexpected, but happened in a sudden enough way that it was wrenching. Pat barely had enough warning to be by her mother’s side during the final week or two of a protracted illness.

What, you are wondering, does all this have to do with web development? Well, my own meager contribution to all these proceedings was to show up and stumble through the exhausting parade of family obligations, all the while trying to do research and file posts pretty much literally on the fly. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast, we slept in spare rooms. That’s what portables were made for, right?

And, indeed, my faithful laptop—by now the only family computer because our backup machine had recently fried and there was now no budget for replacing hardware—rose admirably to the occasion. I became, as one does under such circumstances, an expert tracker of wifi signals and a usurper of others’ machines with dial-up connections when necessary. I was prepared to write at any time in any place, given the opportunity. There just weren’t enough opportunities.

Then, while wandering around in a fog after yet another sleepless night and readying to spend the coming day at a different in-law’s, I dropped my laptop. Hard. It was still working when I picked it up—it had not shut down yet—so I breathed a sigh of relief and put it back in its case, making sure to zip it securely this time.

Only to find it would not revive when I was ready to use it at the next stop. From the messages I was getting, it was clear the hard drive was disabled. I couldn’t tell if it had just jarred loose (pray, pray!) or was total toast. The main motherboard (well, ROM BIOS, at least) and the display still seemed to be performing.

That was the day before we came home. So now, in job-search mode, we had no computer. I do have a Palm TX, which has wifi built in. But its uses are limited and I was stretching it to those limits.

In the process, I discovered how you can—horror of horrors—maintain a blog (at least barely) without currently possessing your own computer. It isn’t fun and it isn’t pretty, but it will get you through if you have to do it.

Most of us work in environments where we have heavy backup from corporate IT, but those who are vulnerable to a little computer downtime—even just a sustained loss of electrical power—might do well to consider preparations for such emergencies, which I will detail in a piece to follow.

I will also mention, for those who have been following this blog, that I have begun the (so far, painless) upgrade process to Wordpress 2.2.1. I may also add a post on this, if time permits. So far, as I say, there doesn’t seem to be much to report, however.

My other discovery—hardly unique—was the lesser horror of dealing with a new computer and a new operating system (Windows Vista) which I hope also to describe for those who may be interested. As always with these “upgrades,” I found some good and some bad. For the moment, I’ll just say that Windows Vista is very pretty.

As to how good the Geek Squad turn out to be at servicing disabled laptops, only time will tell. I can report that they’re about four days behind schedule so far.

There are some great commercial products out there, such as WS_FTP Home and WS_FTP Pro. In fact, so far as I know, these are the gold standards for ftp client software. I’ve used them both and highly recommend them to anyone who has $39.95 or $54.95, respectively, to shell out. What’s more, Ipswitch will give you 30 days each to try them out before you buy, so you have nothing to lose.

But personally, with four websites underway, I’m running on a shoestring until at least one of them starts turning a profit!

Even if you’re happy using FireFTP as I was until recently, Filezilla is definitely worth the effort to download if you’re not going with one of Ipswitch, Inc.’s premium products mentioned above. The interface is slightly different from FireFTP’s–primarily that it’s drag-and-drop rather than select file(s) and push a button–but it only took me a couple of minutes to figure all that out and get going with it.

The thing I like best about it, I guess, is the fact that it’s a standalone program, so aside from it not bringing down my entire browser and any pending emails should it crash, the interface just feels roomier. I always have so many tabs open in FireFox and so many toolbars active that FireFTP feels like it’s crammed in and lacks adequate space compared to Filezilla. (Of course, I originally went with FireFTP so that I wouldn’t need to run yet another standalone program–don’t think I haven’t recognized the irony of that yet.)

The Ipswitch products are faster and have more features, but I think I’m going to be using Filezilla for a while now as my primary ftp client. Sometimes second best is good enough.

filezilla
FireFTP

Until recently.

I don’t know if the problem is that my Firefox installation has become bloated with all the new stuff I’ve downloaded for clipping and bookmarking (especially the so-called “social bookmarking”) and this is interfering with FireFTP’s operation, or what. (I seem to have a congenital inability to visit the Forefox Addons page without downloading something.)

All I know is that lately, FireFTP has been behaving strangely. It often doesn’t load cleanly and needs to be loaded more than once (separate tabs).

When I then attempt to close the now-useless perpetually loading tab, Firefox tends to crash. In fact, the crashing is quite reliable(!). Having lost a lot of partially finished emails and that sort of thing, I’m now in the process of installing Filezilla to see what that has to offer. I like the convenience of FireFTP, but want to try isolating the problems.

Has anyone else had similar difficulties with FireFTP?

FireFTP