Tag Archives: Meta

Moving the blog to Azure Web Sites

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This weekend an issue with another website running in the same tenant as this blog made the whole system go down. This episode made me finally spend some time moving the blog to Azure Websites. It should be running fine and exactly as before, but if you find anything out of the ordinary or not working, please let me know.

The earlier host was LAMP-based so I had to do some changes to get everything working as before:

1, I had to upload a web.config file to support pretty links and remove the need for index.php in the url. More information here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9965124/how-to-rewrite-the-index-php-of-codeigniter-on-windows-azure

and here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Permalinks_without_mod_rewrite

2, I had to trick Jetpack into working properly since there was an error message about a self signed certificate that made the whole thing go overboard: http://www.tpateman.co.uk/reboot/error-activating-jetpack-plugin/

Apart from that there was just the usual parts, update the dns configuration to support the new dns name in Azure (https://www.stefanjohansson.org/2012/12/how-to-configure-custom-dns-names-for-multiple-subdomain-based-azure-web-sites/), update the dns to point to the new host, migrate the content from the old host to the new and make sure everything was still configured as before.

While doing all of that I also managed to learn about the Core Control plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/),

I also updated a few posts with manual Excerpts so that the posts displayed on the front page are truncated and a sticky post about migrating to Australia…

Update 2013-05-20: I have explored the JetPack issues some more and describe it here:  https://www.stefanjohansson.org/2013/05/workarounds-for-problems-using-jetpack-and-https-on-azure-websites/

Updating the Blog

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Some meta about the blog itself.

I have been using the DejaVu theme by MySiteMyWay for a while but haven’t been that happy with the theme, the features, the look and feel, available updates and the update process. Any day now WordPress will release version 3.5 and with it the new 2012 default theme. its already available and very much less is more in the default look and feel. Since I currently don’t publish much more that normal blog posts about SharePoint, SQL Server and BI in general I thought I’d try the new theme for a while.

Some things aren’t working the same way, search and links to additional social media sites are in need of updating. I hope that the new version of WP will add some new features and that a similar Theme, with additional features, will become available.

I have also started with a series manager to see if some posts can be managed in a series manner. Lets see how that works out. I might need to post a proper series to get it working?