Well, May 25th has come and gone, and I had not seen the promised email about how to get my CS6 upgrade.
I just found the email in my spam box. It was sent May 15.
It’s not like I haven’t been getting any work done without CS6, but it would have been nice to have a couple weeks earlier.
Anyway, if you haven’t received your email from Adobe about your CS6 upgrade, check your spam folder.
Adobe CS 6 is officially released.
See if you eligible for a complimentary upgrade to Adobe CS6 from Adobe CS5.5. Go here and click the links that apply to you.
If you bought it directly from Adobe and registered it, they will send you an email no later than May 25th with instructions for downloading CS6. If you did not buy it directly from Adobe, you will need to follow these instructions on Adobe.com.
So here’s why I did not hold out for the Adobe Cloud and purchased CS Web Premier 5.5. I thought the monthly fee would be too much at $600/year. It made more sense to me to buy CS 5.5 (later upgraded to CS6 for no extra cost) for about $879, because I knew I would use it for at least 2 or 3 years before I would really need to upgrade again. So if I upgrade in 2 years, that’s like spending $440/year for each year – less if I go 3 years = $293.
Now I see that the Adobe Cloud has an introductory offer of $30/month or $360/year for current CS3 and above users for the first year. See promotion here
So did I make the right decision? My gut says “yes” because I am saving money in the long run rather than pay $360 the first year then $600 the next which will come to $960 over 2 years and $1560 over 3!
What am I sacrificing? The latest and greatest when CS7 comes out. I can live with that.
Goodness, it’s been awhile since I posted anything here. And this is not about WordPress, but about the tools I use.
So I just bought the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium Upgrade. My previous version was CS3 Web.
I was planning to buy the CS 5.5 upgrade from Amazon with my tax refund money. The day my refund was deposited, the price jumped up to $890 from about $750. I could still afford it, but I was not happy about the price increase. Plus news of CS 6 launching soon made me hesitant to buy 5.5 because I did not how much the price would be for upgrading.
So I found on Adobe’s Special Offers page there is a 10% discount for orders over $375. The code is “Spring10”. This knocked down the price to $854 which is $36 less than Amazon’s price.
Now it is important to note Adobe will charge sales tax. Indiana’s sales tax is 7% so my total bill went up to $913. Call me a sucker if you want, but I do believe it is right to pay taxes.
I am a member of Ebates.com and will get 4% of the total $913 credited to my account because I clicked through their site, so I will get $37 back (maybe $34 if they don’t include tax when figuring the 4%). Update: It was $34 – they did not include the tax.
Final amount paid: about $876 $879 (doing taxes put me in the habit of rounding)
Another bonus to buying the CS 5.5 upgrade now was the promise from Adobe that the upgrade to CS6 would be free for anyone who has purchase CS5.5.
Yet another bonus: tax-writeoff! (Thanks to my brother Ryan for reminding me about that!)
Until April 15, 2012, you can get 10% off any order of $375 or more using the “SPRING10” promotion code at http://adobe.com. Plus, you will get the Adobe CS 6 upgrade for free when it launches if you buy Adobe CS 5.5 (full or upgrade). I believe this only applies to the download version. State sales tax will be included in the final price. Get 4% back if you click through Ebates.com.
Check out more at Adobe’s Special Offers page.
Well, I just recovered from a bit of a freak-out.
One of my web hosts’ databases crashed so a number of the WordPress sites I managed were coming up with “Database connection error.” The web host techs were quick to fix the database so the sites would come back up, but on one of the sites, all the posts were gone.
My first thought was to restore from a backup. I use WP Database Manager by … so I thought it would be an easy fix… until I saw the most recent backup was from March – 3 months ago.
And my freakout entered into stage two.
After I remembered to breathe, I thought maybe there is an error in WordPress that is misreporting the number of posts. So I logged in to the MySQL admin and found a message saying several of the tables were in need of repair due to a server crash.
So I ran the repair function in the WP Database Manager plugin (I could have used the MySQL admin’s) and all the posts returned!
I checked the backup settings in WP Database Manager next and just resaved the settings. It started working again.
So the moral of the story is don’t freak out when all you posts turn up missing. Check the database for errors.
And make sure your backup is working.
Then I went the plug-in page and it says those plug-ins have been deactivated because they are not found.
Then I tried to reinstall those plug-ins, but that gave me an error.
Then I tried to upload the plug-ins using an FTP client, but I got a “550 Access denied” error.
I logged into my Godaddy Windows shared hosting account. When I tried to access those folders, I got another “Access denied” error.
To fix it, I went to the parent directory “wp-content/plugins” and reset its permissions. I unchecked “inherit”, then checked “read”, “write” and “Reset all children to inherit” then clicked OK and waited for the operation to complete. I looked in the plugins folder and found the problem folders were no longer there, but I could reinstall them successfully.
I wish I could remember where I heard how to fix this, because I would like to credit where it’s due.
On a another blog I maintain, I thought I could prevent the install error by resetting the folder permissions before updating. Nope, didn’t work. The plugin folder did not have “inherit” checked, but did have “read” and “write” checked. I checked “Reset all children to inherit” and click OK as before. So I tried again, but this time click “inherit” for the “plugins” folder and checked the “Reset all children…” box, and it worked that time.
So it looks like if the “inherit” box is checked, you need to uncheck it and vice-versa. Just as long as read and write permissions are getting set for the child folders.
The same plug-ins that gave error when updating on the first blog gave me an error on this blog. Some plug-ins updated fine. So I don’t know if the problem is with the server, the plug-ins, or a combination of both.
Anyone else having this problem on a Godaddy Windows server?
With the release of WordPress 3.1 comes a new admin bar that appears on your site if you are logged in.
If you don’t like it, you can turn it off under your profile settings.
I think I will stick with my current admin bar plugin by Viper007Bond because it has more options.
The spammers are out there, and they are relentless.
You leave one unprotected email address in a post and they will find it.
emOba does a nice job of hiding your email addresses whether you have the email address embedded in a link or displayed as text.
If you are using a plugin like WP Touch to make your site mobile-device friendly, be sure to copy the CSS code from Emoba’s CSS file into the mobile theme’s file or the @s are going to appear huge.
Using $_SESSION variables in WordPress? You need to add this line to your wp-config.php file:
if (!session_id()) session_start();
I just learned about Cloudflare.com today.
From their overview page:
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
I just set them up for this site under the free plan and plan to set up more. The set up was fairly easy if you are used to changing DNS settings for your domain.
What are your experiences with Cloudflare?