Wordpress 3.3 Upgrades Completed

Out of the final three (mission-critical) sites, two went through smoothly.
One did not, and had to be upgraded via FTP, then remove the .maintenance file.
Anyway, that's it. All plugins updated, and all sites running on Wordpress 3.3.

Give it a week, and there'll be an urgent security fix, while everyone is off on their xm,as break..

Eliminate 404 errors! | Conserve Link Juice

Earlier today, I saw, and was impressed by a brilliant idea:
Why not trap all 404 errors (wrong URL), and redirect to a page related to what was typed in?
So there is no "404 error" page, and search engines don't think there's a dead link.

Initially, I thought "redirect 404 errors to homepage". That'd work, but the visitor would probably not get what they were looking for. Search engines would be happy, though.

So I thought: why not redirect to a page related to what the visitor typed as the URL? You could use tags and categories to help in this.

There's a PAID-FOR plugin that does this. It costs $97 for a multi-site license! :(

So, I had a look around, and found the "Smart 404" Wordpress plugin.. Which does exactly what I described above. It misses *some* keywords, but it's pretty damn good, and it's free.

All my main sites now use it..

RSS Error: Blank Line(s) at start of XML - Solution.

I noticed that suddenly I wasn't getting my daily e-mail message from one of my sites.
Now, these messages are generated automatically via feedburner, so it's either feedburner, or gmail, or the actual site RSS feed.

Checked GMAIL to make sure the messages weren't ending up in the SPAM. Nope.
Checked Feedburner. Stats looked OK, but "REACH" had dropped to zero about four days ago.
Damn. Feedburner handles the twitter feed AND email subscriptions.

Further investigation showed that the RSS feed was no longer valid. Blank lines at the start of the XML.

Tried the two main solutions:
fix-rss plugin. Nope.
Then the whitespace remover thing. Nope.

Bit more research, and then I came across a post that suggested looking in the THEME's functions.php file. Alarm bells! I edited that about four days ago..

Loaded it up, and it was a mess. I must have been asleep when I edited that.
Re-loaded the file from backup. (You DO have a backup, right?)
And away we go. RSS is back. Feedburner is back.

RESULT!

Moving Wordpress sites to new hosting..

Due to a) holidays, b) four Bank holidays, and c) my old web hosting deal expiring next week, I was left with two-and-a-half working days to transfer three Wordpress sites onto Unlimited Web Hosting..

Having done this sort of thing in the past (chronicled on this very blog), I thought it'd be a breeze. Backup all files via FTP, dump the databases, and then reload at the other end. Wrong.

Glitch #1. Can't get the data out of jabweb. My databases are humungous, and timeout their export function. Tried everything, including wp-db-backup. (5 hours!)

Eventually got them to "fix" export.php.

Glitch #2. Can't import the database files at Unlimited. Format error. Damn.

So I got on to Unlimited Support. (always excellent), and they said, "we'll do it for you". So they did.
(Apparently one of my database files is "massive".)

Obviously, the new sites were not linked-to by DNS yet, so I edited my hosts file
I FTP'd the files over to all three sites.

Datafeedr had lost all data on all three sites. Bizarre. Manually re-created the ad groups. (Stored in wp-options as one record, by the way..)
One site appeared to have "lost" it's background. Seems to be a problem with Opera - it's fine on Chrome.
But one site had the dreaded "internal server 500 error".
Quick e-mail to Unlimited again, and the problem is traced to the .htaccess file.
Deleted it, and replaced it with a blank, then updated wordpress permalinks, and it's up.

Swapped all DNS to Unlimited.

Now, it'll take a WHILE for the DNS servers to calm down, but it doesn't matter as the OLD version is still a functioning website. To my users, it's seamless..

Done. :)