Ying and Niq’s Niche

Yingniqniche has its own domain at http://yingniqniche.com/. It is a personal project for self-learning - to create blog, self-hosting with subdomain and now hosting with own domain. In the near future when I run out of disk space, I will be looking for hosting. Thanks for your visits and hope you continue to enjoy reading my blog.

Found a fix in wordpress.org forums to format images with border and caption. Previously, my images and captions were quite bare. Now it has a neater look - no more missing borders, and captions are now center aligned. Just add the codes below to your style.css.

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

Sun, 19-Apr-09. Went to Ocean Green Seafood (GPS Coordinates: N5 25.576 E100 19.568) for lunch. This place was quite difficult to find. It is situated by the sea side, at the end of an alley along Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah, just before Despark Auto College. It is easy to miss the turn so go slow. We had oyster noodle, salted egg crabs and stir fried broccoli. The food was nice. Their salted egg crab is one of their signature dishes

Oyster Noodle

Salted Egg Crabs

Stir Fried Broccoli

There is a nice view of the sea.

Sea View at Ocean Green Restaurant

The beach is a popular spot among anglers and offer good landscape photography opportunities. Sad to say the beach is not suitable for picnic as there were lots of ants.

A pseudo-lagoon

I’ve been delaying this for far too long. My last version was 2.6.2. Since then, the Automatic Upgrade did not work anymore. I had to tackle the daunting task myself.

1. Make a backup of the database
2. Make a copy of files and folders where WordPress was installed in the server.
3. Delete the old wp-admin and wp-includes folders.
4. Unzip the WordPress 2.7 zip file into the WordPress location, replacing files and folders.
5. Copy contents from wp-content backup to the new wp-content folder.
6. Copy the information from old wp-config.php (like database name, username, password) to wp-config-sample.php, then rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.
7. Go to WordPress admin page. Then click on button to update database.

That’s all!

For more details read upgrade instructions.

I am proud to announce that Ying and Niq’s Niche is now self-hosted at Free Hostia running on WordPress 2.6.1. Since moving from Blogspot to Wordpress, I found that there are functions that I missed. Blogs at WordPress.com have several limitations – customizing themes, adding plug-ins and monetizing. All these are made available by self-hosting using the latest version. The development process was rather difficult without a step-by-step guide. The WordPress guides had many complicated steps. After successfully self-hosting our blog, it is in actual fact quite easy. One has to proceed systematically:

1. Create account with Free Hostia
2. Download WordPress zip file to your local drive
3. Upload WordPress zip file to Free Hostia (select unpack archive option)
4. Rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php
5. Edit wp-config.php with your preferred database name, user name and password
6. Open install.php in wp-admin folder to install WordPress
7. Export your WordPress.com blog as .xml
8. Import your WordPress.com blog to your self-hosted blog.

Refer to http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress for more details (except for download and extract section). My main problem was uploading files. In the beginning I unzipped to local drive, then upload to web-host using FTP. FTP did not work well, with many files not successfully uploaded. There are many files involved, so it is difficult to trace which files have been uploaded and which ones have not. I gave up on FTP. Then there is the Elefante Scripts installer in Free Hostia with WordPress 2.5 available for installation. However this limits you to an older version of WordPress. Then I tried to upload the zip file and to extract within Free Hostia – it worked! I would have saved many days trying to upload files. Use the same way to upload themes and plug-ins. Free Hostia is not always reliable. Their server may be down sometimes but I can’t complain much about something that is free.