Chris Blackwell’s Domain

I have officially launched the Novo Emporium (www.novoemporium.com) website today! Novo Emporium is a site that I have been working on for a few months. I always wanted to create a website dedicated to business and marketing, and now I have. The design of Novo Emporium is not the greatest and I am going to get one of our designers to put together something better as soon as possible. My main focus was (and always will be) the content.

Novo Emporium? What’s in a name?

The name Novo Emporium is the latin phrase for “new market”. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to call this website. I knew that I wanted the site to be new and fresh, and not talk about old style marketing strategies, because that’s not my thing. I spent weeks playing around with different domains with the words marketing and the word new. Finally it came to me that the web uses a lot of latin phrases. In fact, place holder text, that most web designers use, is latin (Lorem Ipsum). I finally decided on Novo Emporium a few weeks ago and I haven’t looked back since.

Since it took me several months to finally decide on the name for the website, I was able to build up a good amount of content for it. I will talk in another post about the necessity to build-up content before launching a new blog or website. Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Over the weekend I changed the main domain for my blog from thechrisblackwell.com to chrisblackwell.org, and I have given everyone a perfect case study of what NOT to do. I originally registered thechrisblackwell.com because chrisblackwell.com was already taken along with a few other variations. However, I was starting to get too many questions on why I had “the” so I decided to go with a .org domain and simply have my name. The problem is the domain change, and how I went about switching them, was an absolute disaster!

I lost all my subscribers and comments!

When I made the domain change I immediately went to FeedBurner to update the domain and feed details. The next morning when I checked by feed subscription numbers, I got a big surprise when I saw a 0 staring back at me. I posted a small test post, waited an hour, then checked my Google Reader to see if the feed was still being updated. Nope! My Google Reader didn’t see the new post and was still linking to the old domain.

So I’ve lost all my subscribers to my blog that I’ve spent months building up. Well, at least it can’t get any worse, right? Wrong! As I started looking around my blog I started to notice something very quickly. No Comments! I still don’t know what happened to all my comments, but they got all deleted in the move somehow. I am very upset by this as I cherish all my comments and some readers had some very informative information and links.

Hopefully these are all the problems and nothing else will or can go wrong. If you have posted a comment on my blog before, you have my sincerest apologies. Please subscribe again to my blog and help me recover some of what I have lost. Thank you everyone for your kind patience and understanding.

WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this week and it brings an array of new features that most of us have been looking forward to. However, I found the documentation on upgrading to be very vague. While the upgrade is a simple process, I thought a more detailed explanation of the steps to take would be valuable to everyone who wants to do the upgrade. I have broken down the upgrade into nine simple steps that will make sure your WordPress upgrade goes smoothly and error free.

1. Download the WordPress 2.5 package: The first thing to do is go to the WordPress homepage and download the latest WordPress package. Save the ZIP file to your desktop, or wherever is easiest for you to manage. Once the download is complete unzip the entire package. You should now have a folder named wordpress with all the new WordPress files in it. I recommend renaming this folder to new-wordpress so not to get confused later on.
2. Backup your database: I hope this goes without saying but I’ve put it down here just as a reminder. You should download your complete database in full structure and data. I use the plugin WP-DB-Backup, which sends daily backups of my WordPress database to my email automatically. I highly recommend this extension as it allows you to automate your backup process.
3. Download all your files: Even though you are going to be replacing all your old files with the new WordPress files it will be good to have a backup of the old ones for restore purposes. If anything goes wrong with the upgrade you will now have all the files and the database from before the upgrade. The other part here is that you will need the contents of the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file after you upload all the new WordPress files.
4. Edit the wp-config.php file: Open up the folder with the new WordPress files in it. In this folder there should be a file named wp-config-sample.php. Rename this file to wp-config.php then open it in a text editor. Here you will be able to enter your database name, username and password. You can get this information from the wp-config.php file from your old WordPress files which you just downloaded. Most of the other settings in this file can usually be left as default, but check with your host to make sure.
5. Upload new WordPress files: Once you have downloaded all the old WordPress files it will be time to upload the new ones. I recommend deleting the old files on your web server first, just to make sure your FTP program doesn’t skip over any by accident. Find the folder you renamed earlier to new-wordpress and upload all the new files in the folder to the same directory that you just removed your old WordPress files from.
6. Upload the old wp-content folder: Go back to your old WordPress files which you downloaded earlier and upload your plugins, uploaded files, and themes from the wp-content folder. This is a good time to check your plugins directory to make sure you are not uploading any old plugins which you are not using anymore.
7. Update your WordPress database to version 2.5 : Point your browser to www.your-domain.tld/wp-admin/upgrade.php and a WordPress update page should appear. Click on continue and your database upgrade should be underway. Depending on the amount of content on your website, this may be instantaneous or could take a few minutes. When the upgrade is complete, you should now be running WordPress 2.5. Go to the WordPress dashboard to check for any messages or errors that may have been logged.
8. Upgrade Plugins: One of my favorite features of WordPress 2.5 is the automatic plugin upgrades. From the dashboard, click on Plugins on the right hand side beside Settings. If any of your plugins have upgrades available, you will see an Upgrade plugin link below them. If any of your plugins need an update, just click this link and let WordPress do the rest.
9. Check for any errors: At this stage your WordPress blog should be running and stable with version 2.5. Check your site for any coding errors that may pop-up if you have any code reliant on version 2.3 or earlier. In most cases there won’t be any errors as the template code has not changed very much, but if there are any, make notes and start Googling for answers.

One final note that is not a step but is equally important. Do this upgrade when your traffic is at a minimum. Go to your statistics program that you use and look to see what time of day your traffic is at a minimum. For my site it is between 4:00 am to 7:00 am. So ideally I would preform this upgrade at around 5:30 am and give myself a good hour to check for errors and downtime, before traffic starts picking up again. I hope this guide has you well on your way to WordPress 2.5. What do you think of WordPress 2.5? Was it everything you were hoping for? How would you change it?

Apple today officially announced the iPhone will launch later this month in Canada on the Rogers Wireless network. This comes as some surprising news, as we reported earlier that the iPhone was not due to launch in Canada until September 8. Apple has announced that the 16GB iPhone will be available for $499 with a 3-year contract. The data rate plans are said to be along the same lines as the AT&T plans that are currently offered with the iPhone. Sorry to everyone out there who is currently giving their hopes up. Hope you all have a good April Fools Day!

Have you ever watched the television show Clean Sweep on TLC? Well, the host of that television show, Peter Walsh, has take his experience and turned it into the bestselling book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. The book teaches you how to cleanup your house and live a more clutter free lifestyle. I love the clutter free lifestyle and try very hard to keep my house clutter free, but this book opened my eyes to some things even I was doing wrong.

The book itself is broken down into a very easy to follow structure. Part one of the book starts with some case studies telling us how clutter can take control of your life. Then he goes into explaining why you have to remove the clutter from your life, and how you can live a better life clutter free. Part two of the book moves into his six step process for removing all the “stuff” from your house. This six step process is the bulk of the book and is very logically put together. Peter does a great job of breaking down each step and how you need to go about it, even in different scenarios and situations.

Conclusions

This is a very good book for anyone who loves living clutter free, likes to increase their productivity, and generally wants to live a better life. I highly recommend picking this book up, and maybe even a few extra copies for some disorganized friends or family members.