Focus on content and not how great and powerful a platform is or how I can play with the header image in every post. Refocus on content. Cut out the bloat. I love WordPress but the platform, a very powerful option which everyone should consider in their quest to run a blog, has grown beyond my personal needs.

What I want here for iFranky is a blog; I don’t need a full-blown CMS.

It’s An Ongoing Fight

This is nothing new and last year two years ago already I tried another platform, Chyrp, here on iFranky. With the impending merge of WPMU and WordPress for the 3.0 version, I feel that my time has come and after the redesign of iFranky to a single column design it is time to simplify the backend as well.

Introducing Habari

In one of my first ever entries on BloggingPro I reviewed self hosted blogging options and included Habari among the platforms, saying the following:

…is one of the blog platforms to watch. Started by some of the core members of the k2 theme for WordPress, the idea behind Habari is simple: a blog platform with the most cutting edge technology.

PROS

• Cutting edge technology, PHP5.2 required;
• Support for both MySQL and SQLite (PostgreSQL support is planned);
• Apache 2.0 license, following the meritocracy principles;
• Support for Apache, Lighttp and Nginx server;
• Respected and blog experienced core developers.

CONS

• Very young community and software, only few themes and plugins available;
• Apache 2.0 license: sometimes discussion, decision can take ages.

Distraction Free Environment

I usually do most of my writing for shorter entries in the WordPress editor and for longer posts I tend to use WriteRoom. Habari itself though makes writing in the post editor a lot more enjoyable and although the full screen experience isn’t reached Habari does a great job at keeping the environment distraction free.

The whole admin interface, experience is totally different. After the creation of Kubrick, co-creation of the marvellous k2 theme for WordPress, which certainly served as inspiration for the Kirby theme for WordPress, a concept for a WordPress 2010 default theme, the Habari interface is another gorgeous creation by Michael Heilemann. You should try it out yourself and give the Habari demo a test run here.

I Love WordPress

My love for WordPress as a software blog package will continue. In fact, expect many more WordPress tutorials from me over at BloggingPro in the next few weeks, but there is no doubt that I will also pay more attention to other platforms at BloggingPro. It will be an uphill battle but it’s a challenge I gladly take on.
The beauty of blogging is to have many options available and it is the task of a general blog news site to report about as many platforms as available.

Personally though I have no need for all the features offered by WordPress and both iFranky and frankylicious will be converted to Habari over the next weeks. This is no decision against WordPress, this is opting for the best platform for the job, the best platform for my needs.

I will also port Notesblog by Thord to Habari.

The error I made was to jump on the bandwagon based on the technical aspect of the platform and even a small, but rather active community. Most important factor though, the main developer behind the platform, was an element I didn’t analyze well enough before making my choice and decision for Chyrp.

As beautiful as Chyrp may be, its problem lays in how Alex Suraci rushes, or not, things.

Alex is a talented coder and has built an awesome platform, but sadly his ambitions are too personal and too little focused on Chyrp for the lightweight blogging platform to become really successful. Alex is ambitious and as a young developer, constantly learning and discovering new coding languages. This sadly to the inconvenience of the Chyrp community and adopters. Some details: a PHP5 is coming… and pending. So is a Ruby port.
The community forums have been changed to a new, non Chyrp related, and unmoderated location at toogeneric. All in all Chyrp is a nice platform, one I will continue to watch, but for now the uncertainties made me switch back to good ol’ WordPress.

I should have known better being a regular early adopter.

But there is better.

And to continue the number game, even though I still am not sure whether to be proud or not of my Twitter hate/love relationship, here’s some tweetscan stuff. From my active and my inactive twitter account. Before you ask why I have 2 accounts, I’ll explain you the stuff you aren’t interested in anyway: my first account was a residue of the personal blogging area. A twitter account in the category of noise. Loaded with lots of personal internet drama memories. I wanted to and had to move on some day. My actual account still is noise, just much less.
But the important thing about both graphs is that I actually might have to listen to all my friends and try to get a regular life schedule. Not have the period from 0:00 to 04:00AM be my most active period of the day.

The best thing about twitter in my case is when I started tweeting.

November 2006. :-)

None of the themes I will release for Chyrp will support IE6. There are enough of reason to upgrade to IE7 and if you can’t upgrade you should whether buy a legal Windows XP or not waste your valuable company time blogging.
Platforms such as Windows 2000 are not supported by MS anymore, there’s no reason to provide a backward compatibility for non-supported systems.

Period.

Update

Of course I could not stick to this for a long time, thus meaning that the site here will undergo a live redesign over the next 2-3 days. Learn to deal with the wonkiness, Chyrp is too interesting not to play with.

I am looking forward to play around with Chyrp and prepare a new design, with more color than before, I might stick to my Cutline rotating header images tho. For now tho, I am happy that I am not on WordPress anymore.

Now I must play sleep.

I’m a lazy person and everything which can be done automatically, will be be automated. Replacing links or words in your WordPress database table is a really simple act. Of course, you should first backup your database .

Open your CPanel or Plesk backend and move to the Database —> phpMyAdmin area. Select your database here and move to wp_posts

The syntax to replace strings/data/words/whatevah in your database is simple:

update tablename set field = replace(field,'search_for_this','replace_with_this');

In my case I had to change the URL from serialrecidivism.com; to ifranky.com/amifamousnow, the string looked as this:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'http://serialrecidivism.com','http://ifranky.com/amifamousnow');

go, phpMyAdmin will now tell you how many strings have been changed and you can admire how all your links are supposed to work again, intra-entry.

Congratulations, after some Googling, you now have become a MYSQL authority!

I’ve done it again… Mark all as read. And deleted a bunch of feeds. And at the same time added a bunch of personal blogs again.

The why is simple. I had to play, play with the newest gadget. But most of all because I’m sick of blogging about blogging and bloggers blogging about bloggers. Some days of reflexion confirmed what I already knew: blogging about blogging just isn’t my cup of cappuccino. It will mean a return to tech blogging.

And that MacBook is damn sexy.

Hasn’t fried my eggs once yet, but I could imagine getting used to it. Actually I haven’t used any of the Windows computers anymore since Friday. I discovered right-click for Mac already and even connected my Logitech Bluetooth mouse.

Adium is sexy, the built-in iSight sucks, just as much as .Mac does and window focus after Vista is annoying. I loved the auto hover focus, now I forget to click and start tying always.

My dock is full already and everything I need is installed. Even Remote Desktop for Mac.

Looking forward to go to the local Mac store soon and grab the new alu wireless keyboard, the mini-DVI adapter, a bunch of cases and last but not least Leopard.

On another note: of course it wasn’t going to take long before the iPod Touch was jailbroken. It took me four long days to resist the temptation.

This is my last Mac/Apple post here, future ones will be at the Apple Files Blog, but I first need to finish my design there. Cutline free. Now if only the [delete] button would work as [delete] and not [backspace].

Update: Can’t believe I had to figure this out all on my own, but [delete] is [fn] + [delete]. The keyboard delete is [backspace]. This obviously also is valid for the new wireless alu keyboard.

Step 1: Backup Database Tables and Files including .htaccess
…
Use phpMyAdmin or other appropriate tools provided by your webhost, to backup the database used by WordPress.

Luckily the WordPress codex points at phpMyAdmin for the database backup, because the WordPress export feature is officially useless as a backup tool.
There are several backup plugins for WP, but most don’t serve the optimal purpose.

As blogger you should not only backup your database when you upgrade but you should regularly back your data up. But honestly, who visits regularly the options to backup the database.
I known many website owners, or bloggers, who’d love to know how to regularly backup the database in order to avoid losing all their posts every time they screw up their Cpanel config.
Luckily the mysql backup process can easily be automated with a cron job.

Since many bloggers have cPanel, here is a short howto automate your mysql database backup with a cron job in cPanel.

Select in your cPanel the Cron Job icon and let’s immediately jump to the advanced (Unix Style) experience level. It is just as easy to explain the advanced (Unix Style) option than stick to the standard one. The only difference is the interface, but the command and the needed attention level are the same.

The Command Line

The structure of the command line for the cronjob is following

mysqldump -udbusername -pdbpassword db_name | gzip > /home/cpanelusername/yourfolder/mysql_backup.gz

The different switches explained

• mysqldump
  This is the command to backup the database.
• -udbusername
  This is a double switch The first part -u identifies the user to the database. Obviously you have to add your database username
• -pdbpassword
  Again a double switch, with -p being the trigger to add the database password.
• db_name
  Here we add the name of the database we want to backup
• | gzip
  Triggers the compression for the backup. This is not needed. If you don’t want to compress the backup, we just skip this switch.
• /home/cpanelusername/yourfolder/mysql_backup.gz
  This is where we will store the backup and how it will be named. If you have opted not the compress the mysql backup, change the extension gz into sql. Of course you can name your backup and folder(s) differently.
  Feel free to be creative. I am boring conservative and save my backups in the folder /home/mycpanelusername/etc/dbase.
  It could be that your server is setup differently and doesn’t follow the /home/cpanelusername/ structure. Normally you find the path to your root folder in the cPanel sidebar. If not, best is to contact your hoster and ask.
  cpanelusername is the nick you use to login into your cPanel.

When do we run the script

Last thing to define is when to run the script. Cron Jobs follow an easy structure for this.

• Minute
  What minute of the time period. Values from 0 to 59
• Hour
  What hour. Values from 0 to 23
• Day
  What day. Values from 0 to 31 (remember the shorter months)
• Month
  Which month, 0 to 12, Gregorian Calendar.
• Weekday
  Guess… 0 to 7, 0 and 7 being Sunday.

Some examples for dates.
- 1 * * * * : Every minute after the hour, daily. * works as wild card, EVERY unit.
- 12 4 * * 3 : 04.12AM every Tuesday.
- 6 22 15 2 * : February, 15th at 10.06PM.
- 1 0 * * 1 : Every Monday at 0.01AM.
As can be seen in last example (every Monday), it is easy to create another job for every day (remember to give your file another name for every day as well). There also is an option to date stamp the backups but this might not work on every cPanel install and also is the best way to clutter your web space because probably you’ll forget to delete the old files anyway. This will overwrite your backup every time.

Update: I have expanded this entry with How to backup files/folders on BloggingPro.