Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

You may have gone to http://lawrence.chen-online.net, and ended up here. But, you are in the right place.

I had been meaning to upgrade the blog software for a long time, the old site was running 0.9.2 of b2evolution. Which I had extensively modified its PHP code to introduce a variety of customizations. Both appearance and back office hacks. Particular in dealing with spam.

Not sure if the new version does spam as good as I had it before, but they are up to version 2.4.1 now and there are some neat things that it can do that I've been wanting to try.

When my old host (before dreamhost) decided to become unreliable (without explanation), I wasn't ready to do the work of upgrading...so I restored the blog onto dreamhost and went on my way. But, then dreamhost got unreliable...and I started thinking that maybe I should look at moving once again. While browsing around on godaddy.com, I found that lawrencechen.net was available...and having some promo codes to try out...I went ahead and registered it. I used GB1.

Follow up:

I then went looking for a new host to assign this domain to. But, first there was Penguicon 6.0.

Just before I was about to leave for it, dreamhost seemed to working better again. Though they don't seem to be completely resolved. I decided that I would watch how things go for a week and then decide what I would do with my new domain name.

Yesterday I decided, to set up the new domain name with dreamhost and start the work on upgrading to b2evolution 2.4.1. And, today I dove in and made it happen.

Only some of my customizations made it into the new skin...I tried to keep to plugins and widgets as much as possible, though some of the stuff I hacked in involved altering the skin code. But, want to leave the core code alone this time.

Now to create some ugly image that'll be my pixel to support the bigtrip.tv