Then things started to take off. I have to preface this next statement because every day I am reminded of something I can do better, some way I can be safer, healthier, a better business person, a better partner, etc. but sometimes one concept sticks. This one came from Seth Godin’s Linchpin. I just had a problem shipping. So shipping has been my big project for the last several months. I successfully fundraised for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and ran a half-marathon in June. I continued to set smaller, more achievable goals in my business and am continuing to meet them. Last month I launched a major project that I thought might never come to fruition.

Without further adieu, I present The Backburner Project that Actually Happened: cincyveg.com

It was a collaboration with a lot of different fantastic people around town who are doing fantastic things. I was very happy to finish this project with them.

My company, Watercourse Technology, is moving forward. This is in large part due to the actions of several talented contractors and now employees. We’ve achieved a few small business milestones and are looking towards the stability a sustainably growing company can provide. We’ve upgraded software and hardware offerings, our capacity for getting things done is greatly increased, and everyone is having fun. Check out our recently refreshed website and leave some feedback if you get a chance.

Next year I’ll be shipping a marathon, some academic achievement and my wedding. Mazol tov!

Moving to WordPress 3.0

Since I’ve already taken the plunge and moved over to WordPress 3.0 and consolidated my various separate WordPress 2.X installs to it, I thought it would be good to document the process I used to try and help others who might be wary of taking the plunge. There are unlimited ways that you may have your particular install set up, so this may or may not apply. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.

It may be obvious, but before you do ANYTHING with your WP install, back up your files and your database. Backing up your files is as easy as downloading your install directory locally via FTP, and if you aren’t familiar with how to back up your database (YOU SHOULD BE BACKING UP YOUR DATABASE REGULARLY) there are good instructions here. Go back up your site, and come back when you’re done.

Everything safe? Ok, now…you want to go to your WordPress dashboard, hit Tools, and Export. What you’ll get is an XML file of all the content from your blog: posts, categories, tags, authors, etc. Save this in a very, very safe place. This is the file that you will use to import your blog into your new WP 3.0 site. Repeat this step for every blog you hope to move, renaming the Export file into something recognizable.

In my particular instance, I had a site set up that went like this: at the root level of my website, I had just a flat HTML file that was my homepage. I had two different WordPress 2.X installs in subdirectories (/wp and /eliza). What I wanted to do was to install WP3.0 in my root directory, and then use the Multisite functionality built in to WP3.0 to re-create the /wp and /eliza blogs, running in the single root-level install.

After backing everything up, I went ahead and installed WP3.0 in the root directory. There is then one bit of manual code you have to add in order to enable multisite capabilities. In your wp-config.php file, just before the line

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

You need to add the line

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

This enables multisite capabilities. You’ll have to do a little bit of copy/paste into your .htaccess file, but WP walks you through it. When you log into your install again, you’ll see a new set of controls in your dashboard relating to these new capabilities.

One more bit of editing is needed before you move on to creating new blogs and importing your XML files into them…by default, WordPress filters imported XML by removing possible troublesome tags…unfortunateely, including things like <embed> and <iframe> and other instances where you’ve included content in your posts. WordPress does so via a file you can find in /wp-includes called kses.php. In kses.php, you’ll want to scroll down to line 1309 and comment out the three lines under //Post filtering so that they look like this:

// Post filtering
#add_filter('content_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
#add_filter('excerpt_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
#add_filter('content_filtered_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');

This will prevent the filter from removing all your youtube videos, slideshare embed, scribd documents, etc. Once you’ve altered the filter and saved it, you’re ready to create your new blogs, hit the Tools menu, and import your XML from your exports above. After the process completes, you should have a working blog with all of your previous content in place exactly as before.

For my particular case, it was important for me to maintain the existing directory paths for /wp and /eliza so as to not break tons of incoming links…WP3.0 handles that perfectly. After all this, I now have WordPress running at the root level of jasongriffey.net, Pattern Recognition and Brand New World working exactly as they were with the separate installs (including permalinks!), and will be moving my previously flat-file homepage into WordPress pages. I’ve got my whole site running on WordPress, and the ability to create new blogs at will in order to expand my setup.

I’m chuffed about the setup, and really, really excited about the possibilities with WordPress 3.0.

Also at TechConnections last week I listened to Ed Liddle talk about free tools to image machines. My personal nerdism does not cover this subject area so much, but I do have a limited understanding about running machines off an image. We do that at the library where I work. During his talk he mentioned that most computers manufactured today have much more power than they will ever need as a public workstation. This is important information when considering partitioning a hard drive, but something else about this statement caught my attention. I thought about all of the public terminals with so many gigs of hard drive and processor space going unused (not to mention the electricity at night). And thought about how slow some of the servers can get around here during a busy afternoon. I’m really curious what kind of solution these public terminals can provide. Knitting a system together could be a big pain and might take a huge initial resource investment, but could really save an institution a great deal of money in the long run. Perhaps someone has already developed a method for using this untapped resource. I’m interested to find out.