techiehenry

I made this post using a client application called GNOME Blog. This application lets me compose articles and post them on my blog, without the hassle of logging into the Wordpress dashboard.

It has built-in spell checking, link formatting, and text formatting as well. These are readily available in a toolbar below the text area, as shown in the screenshot below.

It’s not without its flaws, though. Its simplicity means that I cannot switch to HTML editing mode. I can only paste images but I cannot resize them. I cannot set which category my post belongs to, it chooses the default. I cannot save my work to disk, so this would mean that I have to finish my text (or copy and paste it to another text editor to save it). After posting I had to go and edit the document once more to set the category and place any image I want to add to it.

For simple posts, this is a good tool if you find that going to your blog software’s web interface to post articles is slow and inconvenient. However if you want more control, try looking elsewhere.

How was I able to change the DNS settings of my Linux box to OpenDNS and make sure that the DNS setting won’t overwrite it?

1. Use your favorite text editor to open the file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
2. add this on a new line:
   prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;
3. Restart your connection.

How do you know that the settings took effect? Go to http://welcome.opendns.com/ and look for that big check icon.

Thanks to the support team from ploghost, it seems that everything is working fine now. How was my problem solved? Well, it turns out that my request earlier to point my domain to ns1.wordpress.com and ns2.wordpress.com (after I registered the techiehenry.com domain) was not updated after I switched to paid hosting. So I went and requested for an adjustment — and everything was done within the day.

So, the solution to my problem is now two-pronged. First, the DNS settings of my computer was switched to OpenDNS. Second, the domain setting problem was corrected.

Lessons learned:

1. OpenDNS is better compared to using PLDT’s DNS servers.
2. Don’t forget to request for a setting change in your domain after switching hosts.

That’s another case of PEBKAC for ploghost’s support team. Heheheh.

This morning I noticed something weird happening to my website. There were times that I have trouble accessing it from my home connection. What I noticed was that my browser, as well as my ftp clients (command-line and GUI client) get stuck with the “Looking for techiehenry.com” message, indicating that it is looking for the equivalent IP address for the domain name.

Thinking it was a web hosting issue, I contacted the support people at ploghost. Somebody did a test from their side and tried to ping the name. Apparently things were working okay. Next that I checked was from PLDT’s side. I changed the DNS setting of my machine and set it to that of OpenDNS. After changing the DNS settings in my machine, I was able to access my website again, web and ftp.

Is there something with ploghost and PLDT that they’re having problems connecting with each other? That I need to find out in a few days.

Looks like a simple export and import routine isn’t that simple for Wordpress. Though I have all posts from the previous blog uploaded here, the images are still linked to the previous source.

It might take some time before I could move all the images here. It might have been a good idea to just keep linking the images in my posts to ImageShack.