I have been troubleshooting WordPress today as I have noticed a couple issues:

1. On my first Hello World blog I noticed when using an apostrophe it had a strange behavior. It keeps adding additional apostrophes every time I save. So if I wrote I’m, it would change it into I”m. If I saved the blog again it would change to I””m.

2. Downloading and upgrading plugins would fail with “Could not create Temporary file.”

It turns out that problem #1 is not a WordPress issue but a PHP setting issue. I found this site which explains how to disable Magic Quotes. Just had to add “php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off” to my .htaccess file and no more issues.

The solution to Problem #2 was not as nice. Tried numerous things from the support thread but in the end the only thing that works was changing the permissions for the wp-content folder to 777, perform the updates, and then revert the permissions back to 755. Not ideal but I suppose I won’t be updating and download plugins that often.

I was able to easily add the Twitter integration to pull from @toddmoore using the “Wickett Twitter Widget” Plugin. It was so simple that I highly recommended it. My previous WordPress blog suffered from a lot of SPAM in the comments so I also enabled the Akismet plugin to manage it.

I think WordPress and the various plugins are great.

This is my first blog posting as I just purchased the toddmoore.com domain which is something Ive been trying to do for the last 15 years.  It always seemed another Todd Moore owned it or it was being sold by a cyber-squatter looking to make some easy cash.  That’s who I just bought the domain from, a money hungry cyber-squatter.  Such an awful way to make money but at least I finally own my name.

I’m currently thinking about writing a book on iPhone gaming so it made sense to go ahead, bite the bullet, and pay the ransom for this domain.  I immediately registered it for like 20 years just for good measure.  I’ve installed the latest Word Press and I’ll be expanding it with new content and features.  I think integration with twitter will be the first thing I try.

Cheers,
Todd
@toddmoore