On Sunday as I was looking some of my blogs that share the same domain I noticed that the “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.” message had disappeared. I didn’t think much of it, but a while later when I happened to scroll to the bottom of the page I noticed that it said my WP version was 2.5.

That was strange. You see, the blog I was working with had just been updated to version 2.3.3 using files stored on my computer. The same files that I’d used to update a few blogs on my other domains over the last couple of weeks.

I went and looked at each of the other blogs that I’d updated from 2.1 or 2.2 to version 2.3 and those that were on their own domain still said they were using WP version 2.3.3, but all of the blogs that are located on my Feverishthoughts.com domain - even the ones that are still using much older versions of WP say that they are using WordPress version 2.5 now.

I checked the files for each of the now 2.5 blogs using FTP and by looking at them using my hosting c-panel and there were no extra files that shouldn’t be there. I even checked my web hosts Fantastico version of WP and they are still only using the 2.3.3 upgrade so there’s no way that they did some kind of automatic WP upgrade on my behalf.

The fact of the matter is that the blogs that now say they are using WP version 2.5 are still really using whatever version of WP that they had been prior to my discovery. Nothings changed in the admin panel - you know the new look that 2.5 is supposed to have? Everything about the way the admin area of my blogs are set up are still the same.

So why do some of my blogs say they are using WP version 2.5? Is it some kind of WP glitch? If it is, why don’t my blogs that are on their own domain now also falsely say they are using 2.5?

Has anyone else noticed this strange problem?

BTW I do plan on upgrading all my sites to WP 2.5 shortly, but I’d like to wait a few weeks to be sure that most of the glitches are out of the latest version. I also want to make sure that the plugins that I’m using have upgrades that work with 2.5 as well.

So for now I’ll stick with 2.3 which the majority of my sites are now using and those that aren’t will be upgraded within a few days. Just upgrading to 2.3 has been a pain because I had to widgetize some sites and change from really old themes with function calls that didn’t work with 2.3 to newer themes. For some blogs upgrading has been a total overhaul!

Earlier today as I was surfing the net and reading some of the blogs I favor I came across an article about a new plugin that will help you prepare your Wordpress installation for an upgrade to version 2.3.3 and coming soon WP 2.5.

The Wordpress plugin is called the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Plugin. The current version, 1.1, is meant for those who are about to upgrade their WP installation to 2.3.

The Preflight Check plugin will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for any problems that might cause errors when upgrading. It apparently also works in 2.3 and may help identify the cause of any current errors as well.

As I stated in March I was slowly going through my sites and upgrading them from Wordpress versions 2.1 and 2.2 to 2.3. I have a lot of blogs and to be perfectly honest with you I still have four left to upgrade!

I’m using some highly customized older themes on a few of my blogs and as I’ve upgraded I’ve found code that I had to alter to work with WP 2.3. I also had to update a number of plugins. This was time consuming work. I’m sure the Preflight Check plugin will make finishing my upgrades to my final four WP blogs a lot easier. Of course I’ve already updated the plugins.

The plugin author is currently working on a version for WP 2.5 so if you’re planning on upgrading to 2.5 soon be sure to check the Preflight Check page for updates.

Oh and don’t forget to backup your Wordpress database and files before you do any upgrades! I use the Wordpress Database Plugin which allows you to not only backup your files to the server, but to have your backup emailed to you as well. You can also schedule regular backups too.

I have a lot of blogs. A LOT of blogs. I’ve been delaying updating them because I knew it would take forever.

I’ve slowly been updating my installations over the past week. For my newer domains it wasn’t such a problem because I could use Fantastico to update them … and since their newish they weren’t all that out of date.

However all my older blogs, including this one, moved servers twice last year and I lost the ability to automatically update with Fantastico when I moved the sites to new servers. If I’d done fresh installations using Fantastico to install WP on the domains and directories first and then transfered my former databases into the new installations I could have avoided this problem, but that’s not the way things worked out.

Oh well … I don’t mind manual updating the blogs. It just takes time.

I’ve had a problem with my blogs for a little while. My problems started back when the Bad Behavior plugin had a problem a couple of months ago. Remember something with the blacklists went wrong and it blocked people out of their WP installations until they either turned off their plugin or updated it? Well I did the update and I updated my Google Sitemaps plugin at the same time and ever since then I had an error message whenever I published an article (on 7 different blogs!) and I don’t think my do follow plugin was working correctly either.

Well now, along with updating this blog to WP 2.3.3 I’ve also updated Bad Behavior (it’s latest version is 2.0.13 if your keeping track) and Google Sitemaps ( Version 3.0.3). At first I thought I still had a problem, but I refreshed the permalinks and tada - it’s all working well again.

I wasn’t that far behind in updating Wordpress. I think this blog was 2.2 … so it hasn’t been that long since I updated. However, WP has done a lot of updates in recent months and between the problems I was having with the plugins and being behind in upgrading WP I knew it was time to upgrade. I won’t fall so far behind again!

So far I’ve updated 6 new domains plus this domain. Now I’ve got 7 blogs on Feverishthoughts.com and one on yet another domain to manually upgrade. It will probably be a few days before I’m completely done … sigh.

Can you believe this?

Yesterday evening I was using my laptop and my email program, Eudora, was acting up. For some reason it freezes up when I visit websites that have flash on them. So I rebooted my computer in order to get my email to work properly again.

When I rebooted my IP address must have changed. I’m with Rogers.com and my IP address can sometimes change each time I log on to my computer or I might have the same IP for weeks or months on end. Usually this doesn’t cause any kind of problem for me.

So I’m working on my computer, checking my mail and I try to moderate some of the comments that have come in on the blogs that I maintain. I can’t do it.

I got an error message stating that my IP has been marked as spam and blacklisted. I was given a Key that I can use to solve the problem myself, but of course that only resulted in an error message. The other option I was given was to write to the moderator of the site. In other words write to myself?

I didn’t clue in right away as to what the problem was. I tried going into my Wordpress admin section to see if I had added the particular IP address that I seemed to have been assigned by Rogers to the WP ADMIN Options Discussion section. Nope. It wasn’t there. I’d only blocked a few IP addresses on my home and garden blog and no others.

Naturally by this time I’d been trying to solve the problem for at least half an hour and I was starting to freak out a little bit as I had at least 7 sites that I could no longer moderate comments on! I also assumed that I wouldn’t be able to write a new post either.

I eventually logged into my web hosting account and opened up the file manager in C-Panel. I checked to see if any new files had been added that I hadn’t placed on the server. I also opened up PHP MyAdmin to check my sites databases to see if I could remove the blocked IP. I did find the blacklist and determined that it was from my Bad Behavior plugin. I tried to remove the blocked IP address from my MySQL database and then I rebooted my computer again.

Uh … now I couldn’t even log into any of the blogs that I maintain on my feverishthoughts.com domain. I didn’t bother to try any of my other domains as I assumed they would also be affected.

By this time I’d probably wasted an hour and a half and comments were piling up and I had posts I needed to write. I was getting frustrated.

The best solution I came up with was to go into my hosting account and change the name of the bad-behavior plugin folder in order to deactivate the plugin on the sites in question.

It worked. I could now log into my sites and moderate comments, create posts and so on.

However I no longer have the wonderful spam protection that I got from the Bad Behavior plugin.

I’ve been using Bad Behavior for about a year and it’s been wonderful. Just turn it on and it automatically blocks spam before it even gets into your comment moderation list. Prior to using Bad Behavior I was sometimes getting 400 to 500 comments spam messages each day on some of my busier sites!

There is a way to edit the whitelist file and I suppose I’ll have to do that sometime today as I’m still assigned the same IP address that caused all these problems yesterday evening.

The only other spam protection that I use on my blogs is the built in Akismet plugin that comes with Wordpress. Up until now that combination has been sufficient. I may look into also using Spam Karma.

Have you ever had your own IP address blocked by your spam protection software?

UPDATE:

If you are using Bad Behavior it was updated today. Yesterday the creator of the Bad Behavior plugin moved servers and accidentally decommissioned an old blacklist that he thought wasn’t being used by Bad Behavior anymore. Unfortunately it was and many users of the Bad Behavior plugin found themselves locked out of their own sites as a result.

The plugin has now been updated to version 2.0.11 and it should resolve the problem. I’m about to update this plugin on all my sites now.

I’m thankful that the plugin creator was so quick to resolve the problem that he inadvertently created. I’d be lost without my Bad Behavior plugin protection. Yes, that’s just how good Bad Behavior really is - try it for yourself.

I spend time on a variety of blogging and webmaster related forums and quite often, when someone switches from a free blogging platform such as blogger to hosting their own website they are confused by … well, a lot of things since everything is new to them, but FTP seems to one major source of confusion.

If you are new to using an FTP program in order to upload files to your server I would suggest that you use the free program FileZilla. While it’s true that some hosting programs have created a simplified version of FTP that is very easy to use directly from your hosting account (I believe) most do not provide this service and you must use external FTP programs to move large files.

You might be asking yourself “why would you need an FTP program in the first place?” Well, if you are a blogger you might want to find new themes or plugins to use on your blog. Most themes and plugins have a number of files packaged together in a folder. While it’s true that you could upload the zipped file into your Wordpress -> Content -> themes or Plugin folder on your server using the c-panel File manage it is often much faster and easier to use an external FTP program.

As I said I would recommend download the easy to use FileZilla as your FTP progam.

Go to the site and click on “Download FileZilla Client - all programs” button.
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