Yeah. WordPress 2.5.1 is now available for download. According to the announcement page, it fixes over 70 bugs on 2.5 released.

I consider myself lucky since I have planned and allocated my time today to upgrade blogjer at least to WordPress 2.5. But thank God, the latest version is available there, so this is a bonus for me. In fact, I didn’t even know that 2.5.1 had just been released 2 days ago.

Since this blog was setup almost a year ago, this is the first time I’m upgrading this blog. I’m kinda lazy sometimes to upgrade my WordPress. Until that Sunday..

The upgrading process runs smoothly. But the WordPress Automatic Upgrade is not working this round. I don’t know why. It got stuck in the step of downloading the latest WordPress file. So I continued the installation manually. Thanks to Am for the precious Upgrade WordPress Tutorial. I didn’t know that the upgrade process is pretty simple and straight forward though.

Overall, I did not see any big issue. Only my SK2 is not working properly, it prompts a message error on its plugin setup, but I have since disabled it and enabled back my Akismat temporarily. I’m in a hurry to read a few ebooks that I had just bought yesterday.

I have also migrated blogjer to Serverfreak to take advantage of a more powerful server (hopefully) and to avoid intermittent downtime with Netkl. I still recommend Netkl, it is not their fault either (due to data center issue).

This is the first time I’m doing this. At first I would like to hire someone to do it, but after considering that I have a few more websites (bigger db and file) to be migrated soon, I say to myself why not you do it yourself. Save money and at least I have hands-on experience to do it. Furthermore, if I break apart blogjer, I still have other copy on another hosting.

It takes quite a while to boost my confidence to do it by myself, but these 2 tutorials at howtospoter and optiniche really is a time saver for me. Within an hour everything completed.

However, it took almost 2 days for the DNS replication to complete. When it was first set, DNS was pointing to the new web hosting in within 3 hours. However 1 day after that, it seems that the DNS had pointed back to the old webhosting (I put both server name in my nameserver, to avoid downtime). I’ve no idea why it happened, so in case if you’ve had encountered such a case, I’d appreciate if you can share it.

How to identify if you’re pointed to the new location? You can view the source and look for the line such as below

<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />

Btw, did you notice the performance improvement?

Have you upgrade your website?

You might want to consider upgrading your wordpress ASAP if this is what going to happen soon. Some screen shot of my new dashboard

The new dashboard


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Dashboard bottom


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Plugin page


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The new post editor, nice huh?


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Post editor bottom


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The new widget page, the old version function better I think


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Plugin menu, not much changes


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Some menu now located at the right hand side

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Designer : Justinadlock.com

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Designer: Justionadlock.com

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Designer : Darrenhoyt.com

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Designer : 5thirtyone.com
demo : none

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Desinger : max.limpaq.com 

Paid Version 

Paid

Revolution theme

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Designer : Revolutiontheme.com
Demo
Single-Use Package – $79.95
Multiple-Use Package – $199.95
Developer Package – $399.95

This is not another contest!! I’m happy to announce that there are 50 WPDesigner’s themes club accounts up for grab on first come first serve basis. No string attached

Last month, I paid USD5 to join this club which guarantees you at least 12 themes per year. The best thing about this club membership is, you’re free to redesign the template without having to put back the link to the original creator. In fact I’ve used in on my new blog which I’ll announce soon once it reach 20 posts

WPDesigner owner, Tung Do, nick named “Small Potato” is very generous to give away 20,000 memberships with certain condition. You can’t get this membership from him free of charge from him. But, the good news is, I can, but it is limited to first 50 person only

How to get your account? It still pending the download script from WPDesigner, but if you interested, please follow the guidelines below-

1. Compose an email to zakifahmi [at] gmail [dot] com. Replace [a] with @ and [dot] with .
2. Put subject “WPDesigner account@Blogjer.com”
3. Write whatever you want inside (as long as not SPAM, love letter or try to sell something). Send it and done. I’ll reply with download link once I get update from WPDesigner.

Update 7-March-2008 : I just got the download link and pass code. All emails replied

If you notice, blogjer.com is very slow for the last couple of days. I’m very much aware of this, but I couldn’t find out what was happening initially. Only blogjer.com is affected. The rest of the websites sharing the same web hosting package work fine.

After hours of digging, I finally know why. This is how it started. Few days ago, I installed WP-OpenId, OpenId plugin to allow commenting using OpenID standard, which means you can use your account such as Yahoo, Technorati to leave comments. But unfortunately it did not go as smooth as I had predicted.

The problem even started in the midst of activating this plugin. Since I’m still using php4, I have to change some part of the code to get the plugin activated. It works, but the problem didn’t stop there. On this plugin menu, there is 1 warning that I don’t expect to cause slowness on the whole blogjer.com. Furthermore it is a warning message only, not an error. I know it was my mistake for not doing further research when I see this error initially. My bad.. I leave the warning message in place without taking any action. This also causes the drop of the number of visitors and traffic to blogjer. 

I’m suspecting this is some kind of memory leaking perhaps

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in
/home/myusername/domains/mydomain/public_html/wp-content/plugins/openid/interface.php on line 379

There is adiscussion about this error, but no resolution is found at this point. I have deactivated and deleted the plugin from my hosting package, but it seems the problem can still be seen slightly. I’m thinking of installing WP-Cache2 to increase the performance, but maybe on a later stage and after doing feasibility study of this plugin. I don’t want the same problem reoccurring.

Off topic, I found this articles which is top of the google’s search for the keyword ‘how to improve WordPress performance‘ but it seems like no one is commenting this article. Does it mean that its not good enough, or that Google has mistakenly put this article on top of search engine result?

In case if you’re interested on how to improve your wordpress performance, you better check out WordPress optimization page. There are bunches of information available there.