Sorry, no posts today on the penguin, I’ve been a bit busy with two things that took away a bit of time, that I want to tell: flattr and wordpress 3.1.
Flattr , today I joined the site flattr.com, i like the idea behind this project very much, make micro-payments to those sites or projects that i choose to help, also with small amount, to support them economically.
wordpress 3.1, On February 23, 2011, WordPress Version 3.1 “Reinhardt” was released, i waited until today to see if there were some know bug to avoid before upgrading, and today i did it… well almost painless.
More details below …
Flattr
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn’t for a really important cause. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01? And €10 was just too high for just one blog entry we liked…
Flattr solves this issue. When you’re registered to flattr, you pay a small monthly fee. You set the amount yourself from 2 € to 100 €. In the end of the month, that fee is divided between all the things you flattered. You’re always logged in to the account. That means that giving someone some flattr-love is just a button away. And you should! Clicking one more button doesn’t add to your fee. It just divides the fee between more people! Flattr tries to encourage people to share. Not only pieces of content, but also some money to support the people who created them.
Flattr will currently get 10% (for maintenance) of your subscription and divide the rest evenly between the people you flatter. But they say that once the website grows, they will stop asking for the 10% fee.
How i’ll use Flattr ?
Personally, I will try to divide my monthly quota between 5 to 10 fllatr, selecting only GNU/Linux and open source projects or websites/blogs/projects that deal with these topics, i will also share an article with all of you to report what i’ve liked during the month.
And from today you will also notice a flattr button at the end of each article on Linuxaria, use it if you particularly liked an article and want to give me a pat on the shoulder.
WordPress 3.1
If you have visited the site today you may have seen a white page instead of the site, fortunately did not last long, that’s was the first result of the upgrade from 3.05 to 3.1 of WordPress.
I trusted too much WordPress, so far I had run all the updates automatically without any problems, and so today I launched the automatic update and got the blank page and on error log a “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class Walker_Page in …/wp-includes/post-template.php”
Luckily, it is a fairly common error, and so I started looking at the WP forums for a solution, and i found some useful post:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/troubleshooting-wordpress-31-master-list?replies=12
http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_Troubleshooting
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended
To solve my problem i did these 3 steps (Point 2,3 and 4 from a ftp client):
- Downlaoded version 3.1 http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.1.zip.
- Uploaded the content of the zip on my hosting site overwriting all the old files.
- Deactivated all plugins, renaming the plugins directory in plugins_broken and doing an empty plugins directory
- Renamed my theme directory to mytheme_broken
- At that point going on the administration page i got the option to upgrade the Database and i clicked on it.
All solved after this, i had to move back my plugins and theme, but all was working fine (just 1 plugin to be updated at last release qtranslate)
So lesson learned (maybe), better wait a bit after the publication of a new release to have a greater user base experience, always make backups, and read the forum first to see how it went to the others.
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