Basically, after you update to 2.6, the Wordpress admin panel will notify you that you are able to activate Google Gears. If you choose to activate this feature, Wordpress will then install it and you will be prompted to grant permission to Google Gears to access your Wordpress installation. Google Gears will then automatically start to store necessary Wordpress files and all of your posts on your local computer so that you can work offline.

Thats it, once transfer is complete you can open up your computer anywhere in the world and whether or not you have internet access you will always be able to access and edit your wordpress posts from your web browser.

Screenshots are available on Anieto2k’s post (Spanish)

Attention Seller:
In order to maintain a safe trading environment, selling limits are occasionally placed on accounts. Your eBay account has been restricted from listing this item at this time until you have verified through PayPal.

1) To verify your PayPal account, click on your country of eBay registration below to understand how to complete that process.

2) If you already have a verified PayPal account, and are still receiving this message, you need to link it to your eBay account.

For instructions on how to become PayPal Verified or how to link your PayPal account to your eBay account, please click on the site of your eBay registration below:

I proceeded to follow eBay’s instructions and followed the steps on the Paypal website to become a ‘verified’ seller. I then followed the below steps to ‘link’ my paypal account with my eBay account:

1. Sign into My eBay
2. Select the ‘Paypal Account’ link from the left-hand menu
3. Click on ‘Update Profile Summary’
4. Log into Paypal

This should link your account to eBay.

After following the above steps, if you are able to offer worldwide postage, you are indeed lucky. I was not and so next tried the following:

1. Log into Paypal
2. Click on ‘Profile’
3. Under ‘Selling Preferences’ click on ‘Auctions’
4. If your eBay account name isn’t present then add it.

Unfortunately, this still didn’t solve the problem (although it may solve yours). I did some more searching around and found another possible solution:

1. Sign into eBay
2. Go to My eBay
3. On the left hand side, underneath ‘My Account’, select ‘Addresses’
4. Click on ‘View all postal addresses’
5. If your ‘Paypal Address’ is present then make that address your primary address (Hit the ‘Make Primary’ link on the right hand side.
6. If your ‘Paypal Address’ is not present then you will need to scroll down to the ‘Add PayPal Addresses button’ below the list of available addresses and ‘link’ your eBay addresses to your Paypal account.

This last solution did the trick for me and I am now able to offer worldwide postage of my items on any eBay site (US, UK, Ireland etc)

Hopefully this guide will help anybody else out there who has encountered this problem find a quick solution.

After googling around for a while, I managed to find the below solution on twhirl’s blog which seemed to do the trick for me:

Go to Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access and Computer Defaults
Expand Custom, select the radio button next to the application you want to set as the system-wide default browser (there will be a few options - such as IE, Safari, Mozilla) and apply the setting.

Hopefully all your links should now open in Firefox and not in IE.

For any interested parties, the hide/show function works using the “Scriptaculous” javascript library. I have to admit that I got this idea from Duane Storey’s personal blog - so I’m sending him some link love

If you would like the code, just look at the source code for this page. If you still don’t understand then just leave a comment.

Luckily, my friend Jacob over at jdpictures.co.uk was also a former Heart Internet customer itching to move to a better host. He had done some research and recommended Media Temple’s Grid Service hosting to me. Whilst I’m not going to go deep into the details of this new state of the art hosting technology, basically it means that if your site gets a spike in traffic, the server setup will immediately adapt to deal with it - meaning that your site should never slow down or be suspended. Media Temple also allows you to map multiple domain names to one hosting account for free (so sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk, jdpictures.co.uk etc. can all be hosted on one server). This basically means that me and Jacob are able to share a hosting package with Media Temple (and share the costs) without having to make any compromises whatsoever.

Jacob decided to sign up for the service and give it a test - since then we have both been progressively migrating our files and databases over to the new server and making changes to the DNS records. Finally sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk and radotages.co.uk (i.e. all my sites) are now hosted on Media Temple and I will shortly be cancelling my Heart Internet account for good.

So far, I have encountered very few problems during the migration and am impressed with the speed of the new servers. The Media Temple control panel is very smooth and easy to use and some of the new features that weren’t provided by Heart Internet have already come in handy. I have been using an SSH shell to transfer my files between servers (using rsync) and also used the shell for database dumps and imports which has made the transfer a breeze. It is of course possible that there are a few hiccups that I’ve not spotted - so if you notice anything unusual then please let me know (leave a comment).

To think that I have been forking out so much cash to Heart Internet each month when all along I could have got more for less is quite frustrating - but at least I’ve made the move now…

The Wordpress upgrade went smoother than expected. After backing everything up, I used ‘rsync’ to update all copies of Wordpress on the server and then followed the upgrade instructions for each site one by one. To my surprise, all the plugins worked fine and some even updated themselves automatically. Much smoother than I had expected!

Regarding the new design - I was fed up with the old one which was ugly, cluttered and difficult to navigate. I therefore downloaded a very mimimalistic Wordpress theme called ‘Simpla’ which i then modified to add a few new features (Flickr badge, Search Box, Twitter Feed, Site Links, RSS Feeds) and its all up and running now.

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any bugs. I’d also love to hear anybody’s opinions on the new design.

Thanks

More recently, whilst making a few postings on this blog and others (all running the latest version of Wordpress), I discovered that whilst I was pasting links to postings on friends’ blogs into the body of my posts, no pingbacks were appearing on ANY of those blogs. I began to investigate and soon found out that not only were pingbacks not working to external sites (or my own blogs for that matter) but any outbound trackbacks were also unsuccessful. On the other hand, all incoming pingbacks and trackbacks were displaying fine - as they had been doing for a long time.

Convinced that this must be some problem with the setup of my Wordpress installations, I disabled all running plugins, checked all relevant options on the Admin panel and tried posting pingbacks and trackbacks to various well-known trackback/pingback testing site (such as TestTrack)… however all this was still to no avail!

Finally, I decided to prove to myself that this was not me just being stupid and made a new clean install of Wordpress on my server and tried using that to post trackbacks and pingbacks. As I had expected, even a brand new and shiny Wordpress blog was unable to successfully send outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This left just one possibile source of the problem… my webhost!

So… I searched around to see if anybody else was experiencing the same problem - lo and behold there was another Wordpress user in exactly the same situation. Here is the thread he created in the Wordpress support forums.

I’ve just installed Wordpress 2.0.4 and cant get pingback to work (trackback does)
My hosting company (shared server) are wondering if its because they block port 80…could this be a problem?

This sounds vaguely familiar to me!

Yes, it is. The trackback is an outbound connection on port 80. I would see if they could allow it for your account.

Um, 2.0.4? You do know that there are much newer versions, right?

Uh oh… sounds like trouble!

Ok - thanks - yeah I did know about version - but my hosting company www.heartinternet.co.uk has a one-click install version which happens to be 2.0.4!

Ooohh! How strange indeed - this other user is hosted by nobody other than Heart Internet. Could this just be a pure coincidence…? Anyhow, I figured a quick support ticket to Heart customer support should do the trick… just ask them to open up outbound connections on port 80 and we’re sorted… right?

Well… actually no! Here is the response I received:

Thanks for the reply. Sorry but I can’t do that, it’s a global change and so not something I can do for you. That’s disallowed to prevent recursive loops from occuring to the benefit of all customers on the same hardware.

Ouch! Whilst I do understand their point of view here, I would argue that its not just me who would benefit from this change. I’m sure that what with Wordpress being the most popular blogging software out there and Heart Internet being such a big host, there are plenty of other dissatisfied Heart Internet customers who would also like to see their copy of Wordpress working properly. To add to the shame, Heart even provide a one-click install option for Wordpress, have a look at their description:

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging software available today! It’s easy to install and use and will allow you to have a great looking blog in minutes. Please note that this feature will use one of your MySQL databases.

Ahem, so even the guys at Heart Internet admit how popular it is… yet they insist on keeping outbound connections on port 80 blocked… tut tut tut! Most other popular web hosts support outgoing port 80 connections, I really can’t see why they are being so stubborn?

So… it looks like for the moment I have hit a dead end and for the short term will be unable to make any outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks using the Wordpress platform. Heart Internet support said that they would “gladly pass long [my] comments” to the guys in the suits but whether this will really have any outcome remains to be seen. My only other option is to move hosts, which I am reluctant to do. As I have already said, until I hit this problem, I was quite satisfied with my web host.

Anyhow, let this be a warning to anybody out there looking for a new web host. If you want to use Wordpress on your site and would like to be able to make the most of Trackbacks and Pingbacks… I would suggest that you don’t visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/ but rather that you take a look elsewhere…