Using WordPress Multisite Subdomain with Hostmonster
For those who used WordPress multisite feature already know that you can choose between subdirectory (example.com/blog) or subdomain (blog.example.com) install after the new installation.
There are two exceptions however. First exception is that your WordPress installation is over one month old. You can only do the subdomain install after activating the multisite feature. Second is that you are running WordPress on localhost, or your hosting provider doesn’t support the subdomain setup for WordPress (more on that later). In these situations, you can only do the subdirectory install.
In order to use the subdomain install, your hosting provider needs to support creating a wildcard subdomain (*.example.com). If your provider doesn’t support the wildcard subdomain, it will return an error while trying to create the subdomain in the subdomain section of the cPanel.
If you are using Hostmonster and have only one domain in the account, the wildcard subdomain needs to point to the root of the public _html directory.
In the Hostmonster cPanel, navigate to Domain > Subdomains or just type “subdomains” in the Find field at the left side of the cPanel homepage and click Subdomains to enter the subdomains section.
Click the subdomains link under the Domains panel
Or just enter "subdomain" into the Find field and click the subdomains link
Once in the Subdomains section, enter the wildcard (*) into the name field of the subdomain. The next step is very important. cPanel will automatically fills up the Document Root field with whatever the characters you entered into the subdomain name field, in this case “wildcard”. You need to empty that field to make it to point to the root of the document.
cPanel will automatically fills out the Document Root field with "wildcard"
You have to empty the Document Root field manually
After the information are correctly entered, click Create button to create the wildcard subdomain.
From now on you could create the new subdomains directly in WordPress without going through the cPanel, unless the new subdomain you want to create is not WordPress-based site.
Add a new subdomain within WordPress admin
Begin Migrating to the WordPress Multisite (Update 5)
This morning I moved all the files on the site to a subdirectory and replaced with a simple maintainance notification. This blog, however, I decided to stay it online to give migration status update within this post. After the migration completed, I will replace this blog with a brand new look.
Look forward to it.
Update 1: WordPress installed on the main site robbychen.com.
Update 2: Deleted all of the subdomains of the site except blog.robbychen.com for providing the migration status update temporarily.
Update 3: Finally enabled WordPress multisite feature. It took me almost 1 hour to figure out the wildcard subdomain issue. If you only have one domain in your account (which is the primary domain), you don’t have to enter anything in the directory path field when creating the wildcard subdomain. Apparently, cPanel always add the word “wildcard” to the directory field automatically. Make sure you drop this word so that the directory field is empty and press submit. It will create the subdomain without any error.
Update 4: The migration is almost finished. All I need to do is to migrate this blog into the multisite network.
Update 5: The migration finally completed. This blog is now a part of robbychen.com multisite network. I still need to convert my old main site robbychen.com to WordPress. I will keep you updated with the conversion process in a new post.
A few Updates and some Information regarding SOPA / PIPA
I had not posted anything for a while. So in this post, I will talk about the upcoming updates for this blog as well as this website as whole and my opinion for the SOPA/PIPA bills.
During the last few weeks, I have learned the ins and outs of WordPress, including WordPress multi-site feature, themes, plugins, etc.
In the coming weeks, I will install WordPress to my main site, robbychen.com, create a portfolio theme or a child theme out of an existing portfolio theme out there, and make my main site as my portfolio to showcase the web development and video projects I finished in the past.
I’m also probably to remove this blog as well as MySQL database that associated with it to migrate it to the main site using the multi-site feature.
That’s all for the update. Now for my opinion about the SOPA / PIPA bills.
In the last couple of days, I read so much about these two bills and how bad they are. I even joined the blackout protest yesterday on this domain. I always thought that the Internet piracy is illegal until I stumbled across this TED presentation.
It basically stated in the presentation that the large media companies have been behind these copyright bills since decades ago. They don’t want us to become the producers and share contents around. They want us to become consumers and just be the “couch-potatoes”. I think that’s why the Internet piracy is born to encourage people to share contents with each other.
Therefore, even if these two bills passed into laws, there will still be a large army of pirates to challenge these companies and find another way to share contents.
Remove AIO SEO related Columns with Greasemonkey and jQuery in WordPress
Since I installed All in One SEO plugin, I have a hard time to look for the specified posts on the Posts page within the WordPress admin area because of the three added SEO-related columns.
All in One SEO plugin is enabled
I don’t like the look of this page, and besides, I don’t use these columns very much. I mainly use this plugin to automatically generate SEO required meta information.
The plugin doesn’t have the option to remove these columns, and editing its source files is useless since they will be restored once the plugin is updated. Using Greasemonkey to modify the layout of the posts page is the only option to permanently to remove these columns.
However, I used to use jQuery to write JavaScript. Writing the raw JavaScript code is a little challenging to me. Fortunately, 0.8 to the latest version of Greasemonkey has the @require metadata block. I can use it to include the jQuery library.
So I wrote the following small segment of code to automatically remove the SEO-related columns once the posts page is loaded:
// ==UserScript==
// @name AIO SEO posts columns remover
// @namespace AIOseo
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// @include http://blog2.robbychen.com/wp-admin/edit.php
// ==/UserScript==
$(document).ready(function() {
$("*[class*='seo']").remove();
});
After the above script is executed, the posts page is now returned to the original layout.
Greasemonkey script loaded
In the above code, I select all the elements and remove the elements which the class name which contains “seo”:
$("*[class*='seo']").remove();
According to the jQuery document, it is called Attribute Contains Selector.
I like to use this layout most of time. If I want to see these three columns for SEO purpose in the future, I would just disable Greasemonkey to show them.
Do you have any suggestion what to do with these column? Post them below.
New Blog Title, New Logo
As you already saw, I changed the title for this blog from “Robby Chen Personal Blog” to “Ubuntu Web Coder “as well as the logo.
One reason for changing the blog title is because I’m going to stick to Ubuntu, specifically Lucid Lynx (10.04.1), since I depend on some PPAs to get the updates. Maverick Meerkat (10.10) just doesn’t work for me. I will wait until Natty Narwhal (11.04) is out and see. If this still won’t work for me, I will stay with 10.04.1 and wait for the next release… Anyway, you get the idea.
As most of you who read this blog in the past know, I used to write code in Netbeans until I discovered the hidden potential of gedit for being such a good IDE. That’s why I abandoned Netbeans and replaced with gedit in the new logo. And I renamed blog title specifically to “coder” because I would like to try writing the code in each post from now on.
Besides the gedit logo in the new logo, I have also included two groups of logos, GNU/Linux and PHP. The GNU/Linux logos include Linux penguin, Chrome OS, Android, and Open Source. The PHP logos include PHP, CakePHP, and WordPress. I also included just released HTML5 logo created by W3C. I regularly use these tools and talked and will continue to talk about them in this blog. That’s why I included them in the logo.
What do you think about the new logo, blog title, and background color?
Continuing C Tutorials and Auto Scheduling Announcement
In the next post, I will continue my C tutorial where I last stopped. I will also utilize the auto publish feature in WordPress to post one tutorial per day so that I can learn the C language and write out the tutorials continuously in a day without breaking the limitation of my posting schedule. If everything goes well, I will also sometimes post some tips that I learned recently. If I don’t have time to write the tutorial because of the school work, I will go back to the one post per day schedule. This means that sometimes I will post two posts in a day and sometimes one post.
Look forward to the next post!
Big Update
I upgraded this blog to WordPress 3.0 today and tried it. I love some of the new features for this release , especially the new theme customization options. Therefore I updated the structure and layout for the whole blog in order to use the full theme customization features in 3.0. Here are the updates I made:
- Switched to the new default theme
As I stated above, in order to use the full theme features, the theme needs to be compatible with 3.0. Some options didn’t appear when I was in the last theme after the upgrade. So I switched to the new default theme came with WP 3.0.
- Logo added (special)
The special means that this logo is only for the blog. The main difference between this one and beta one is that I added Ubuntu and NetBeans to each side of the logo in order to accommodate the header image size for the theme.
- Blog menu added
Menu creation and editing is a new feature in WP 3.0. I placed a menu below the logo. The items for this menu are relevant to the blog.
- Updated blog name and description
This domain name is based on my name. So I decided to rename this blog from robbychen.com Blog to Robby Chen Personal Blog, as well as its subtitle (description).
- Categories restructured
After upgraded to WordPress 3.0, I reordered the categories to include sub-categories once I noticed that the hierarchy feature for the categories was fixed.
I also discovered WordPress.tv when I tried to find the tutorials for WordPress 3.0. It’s the official WordPress video site for providing tips to use WordPress. I’m currently figuring out how to create multi-site setup with 3.0. Maybe I will use WordPress as a CMS for robbychen.com!
Played Around with Drupal, Upcoming Site Update, and more …
I hadn’t write any blog post since last Thursday. The reason is because I had been playing around with Drupal. Drupal is a Content Management System that is similar to WordPress, in my experience, because it can install additional plugins as modules, custom themes, and add pages. However, Drupal has few other features that need to be configured externally if using WordPress, such as the ability to optimize the performance of the site by enabling compression. Perhaps I used WordPress for long time and don’t know how to use Drupal yet, I have not discovered any usefulness of Drupal over WordPress yet. I will continue to learn more about Drupal and improve my Drupal site at diary.robbychen.com. As you can see through the URL, I originally planed to start another diary blog using a CMS app and change the daily post schedule for this blog to irregular post schedule just like my Tumblr-based blog. I decided first to try Drupal because I tried Joomla before and I can’t seem to use it. I think I will try other CMS if Drupal also won’t work for me.
I also plan to update my main site robbychen.com beginning tomorrow since the spring semester is over. I decided to make this site as a portfolio site that include all the programming works that I have done in the past instead of a tutorial site because this domain name is based on my name and it doesn’t suited for a tutorial website or a commercial website. The current layout on the site is based on a commercial website. I will try to create my own site layout and I have decided to apply the color theme of the site based on the new Ubuntu Radiance theme.
Click to enlarge
The ColdFusion to PHP project that I was promised back in January is not possible anymore because I couldn’t find the CA 278 files and can’t convert to PHP without these files. However, I’m organizing the CA 288 class files which is advanced ColdFusion programming. I will rewrote them with PHP as soon as the maintenance of these files is completed.
The Performance of This Blog Has Been Improved
Today I played around with WordPress settings on this blog in order to improve the performance and loading speed of the blog. I have been noticed about the slow loading speed since this blog was created. Because of the lack of free time, I didn’t have any opportunity to investigate and optimize the blog. Since I had free time today, I decided to looking for ways to improve the performance of my blog. I first disabled and deleted most of the plugins used on the blog that I think it doesn’t have any usefulness. I also noticed that some of the plugins that I used are not compatible with the newest version of WordPress. I believed these plugins are the main cause of the slowness of the blog. After I deleted these plugins, I felt the blog loads significantly faster.
Despite that the blog has been improved through deleting the plugins, I still would like to install as much plugins as I like. If you know any technique on how to install plugins without effecting the performance of the WordPress blog, please let me know by leaving a comment below. Thanks.