After installing WordPress yesterday evening I completed the migration to the new 1.5 version this afternoon by installing authimage and iimage-browser. I minimally patched both plugins to my liking. authimage needs <!-- ... //--> around a little Javascript code fragment (routine testValues()). Otherwise the W3C Validator would produce 4 warnings about “<” characters. And for images I prefer to have the image a link to a popup window, which would show the image in it’s original size. For this I created this patch to the file iimage-browser.php, which now allows the creation of a popup window.

And while I was at it, I tuned the style slightly with some picture elements. I find it a little more pleasing to the eye, since the fat blue background behind the dates is gone. The leaf to the left of each date however looks a little bit like a dinosaur footprint from Jurassic Park. Anyway, I hope you like it.

I just switched to WordPress 1.5. Update went very smoothly. Thanks to the ssh access to this site, I could very easily backup and mirror it to my home Linux box. Here I duplicated the directory tree another time into a directory named wordpress, keeping additional copies of index.php, wp-config.php and wp-layout.css. Then I simply untared the WordPress distribution over the directory. After putting index.php and wp-layout.css into the theme directory, editing it according to upgrade instructions and editing database userid and password into wp-config.php I was basically all set. After invoking upgrade.php the new version was operable on my home box.

Only thing I then needed to do is to resync the directory tree back to the web site and invoke upgrade.php. That was all.

The plugins authimage and iimage-browser need to be updated as well, but this will have to wait until this evening.

Purely by coincidence I surfed to the WordPress home page and, surprise, surprise, version 1.5 is released. Since I’ve been fiddling with the mirror installation on my home Linux box anyway, I going to check out this version pretty quickly. And since I’m now in the position to use rsync to mirror and backup my web site, after having compiled a static version and copied it to the web site, the final installation to the my web site will even be easier.

I received an email this morning just as Matthew did. So, in the end I got my ridderbusch.net domain back, but still this whole bloghosts business leaves me mightyly pissed off. No reaction for more than a month. Somehow I can’t believe, that they had so many customers, that all those domain transfers really took more than a month to process.

So, I end up with two domains, one of which isn’t really necessary, but who knows, when I can make use of it. Just as with good software design you can see, that decoupling would have been a good thing in the first place. The lesson to be learned from all this is to keep your domains and web hosting apart.

My web hosting account at Alfahosting is now activated. I was expecting some kind of email, that the account is finally activated once my money arrived, but that didn’t come. So I checked again my administrative pages and found, that I can indeed work with my account. The administration interface is not quite as lucid as the Cpanel interface I’m used to at bloghosts. An advantage is, that it works over SSL. I’ve also changed the nameservers for my ridderbusch.name domain at godaddy to point to the Alfahosting nameservers. Alfhosting now needs to change the initial setup domain of ridderbusch.alfahosting.org to ridderbusch.name. Then I’m all set to move my bloghosts data to the new address.

At home I’ve been busy to implement my current design on top of WordPress. Some finishing touches are required, but otherwise I’m pretty much done. So, I’m hoping to do the installation during the upcoming weekend.

The Cpanel application, which every user uses to configure his account and in turn the webmail access wasn’t working for more than a week now. I was pleasantly surprised to find it working again this morning.

But still no responses concerning the transfer fo domain ownership.