WordPress 2.01 and K2 Beta Two

You may notice a few slight changes around here. After fighting a horrible combination of random events all plotting to destroy my Sunday morning, this blog is back in working form. I have now upgraded both my blogging software (WordPress) and the style that it utilizes – K2 by Michael Heilemann Both offer significant improvements over previous releases.

The “dashboard” in WordPress 2.01 is much more user-friendly than v1.5. Options are much more intuitive and clearly laid out. K2 offers many new features over the previous version, although many will not be evident to the casual visitor. I also finally switched out the header image for an Ubud scene. Suka?

The WordPress upgrade was not nearly the “famous 5 minutes” that is claimed, but much of that is not due to their software, but rather the fact that I live in a country with Internet services stuck in 1995. In my middle of my upgrading process, Uninet decided to take a dump. Sure I could still upload the required files via FTP – at 30 bytes / sec. No that’s not a typo – 30 bytes, not 30 kilobytes or 30 megabytes – 30 bytes. Does anyone realize just how slow that actually is? Imagine waiting over an hour to upload 1 mb. Yeah, neither can I – which resulted in me saying screw it and going to bed.

Upon waking Sunday morning, refreshed and ready to try again, I struggled for a good two hours before finally finding the problem – my crappy web host changes permissions on random files whenever it feels up to it. What does that mean? That when you upload a file you have to ‘allow’ it to be utilized on different levels – by the owner (me), and the rest of the world.

If things aren’t set perfectly in the right combination you get this beautiful luminescence spreading across the screen where you used to have a blog. Hence my research into Dreamhosting services this evening. (anyone use them?)

If anyone else out there has problems similar to mine, please don’t hesitate to write – I’ll guide you through the mess I made and hopefully can steer you away from making the same mistakes.

Five minutes my a$$.