After clicking the upgrade button 6-7 times, and it still refused me to continue on, I decided to go digging on the Wordpress support forum, where several other people had the same problem.

None of the fixes worked though, so I decided to do a bit of digging myself.

Dissecting the upgrade.php file, I noticed a particular part:

<?php if ( get_option(’db_version’) == $wp_db_version ) : ?>

So, the upgrade.php file checks the data in the database to see if the version of the database is correct… Hmm, okay, let me dig up what it says in the database.

A quick visit via phpmyadmin discovered that the value “db_version” in the “wp_options” table was blank. That cant be right? So heading over to another blog which had successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 without any problems, I saw that the value there was set to “8201″ …

I changed the value manually in the database, and now the blog works perfectly.

Please note, that I manually told Wordpress that I had updated the database correctly, so if that is not the case and the upgrade script did not finish running due to some sort of error, I could have broken the blog even more, please try this at your own risk!

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Having trouble upgrading to Wordpress 2.6?

I read a recent post over at No Doubt Marketing, where they mention their top three tools. One of them is the Google Website Optimizer, which I have heard about before, and apparently signed up for once, since one of my old sites were listed under my experiments, but have not used in years.

The tool that Google provides free of charge is simple, but very powerful. It enables you to test which design and sales text that works the best.

You start out by defining your start page, and then the page a customer will see once they have completed a purchase. In between, Google Website Optimizer enables you to try out different headlines, images, sales text, whatever you choose, and then it tracks your success rate. It might be with a few simple changes your product sells a lot better, without you having to do anything more than a few tests and then let Google Website Optimizer do all the testing and analyzing for you.

I will be doing a lot of testing on an upcoming project that I am currently working on.

A small spoiler: Automatic deep link building with a Wordpress plugin. There will be both a free version and a subscription version that enables more features. Contact me if you want to know more before I launch the system to beta.

You can see the flash demo of Google Website Optimizer if you want to learn more about the system and how it can help you increase sales.

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A little known tool - Google Website Optimizer

Basing your decision on experience on finding the best web hosting can be time consuming and frustrating, which is why its great independent sites such as Web Hosting Geeks provides web hosting reviews.

The reviews are by actual users, who can give an honest and real review on the web hosts. There are also “professional” reviews which are made available, but I prefer the reviews by the real users.

For people who are not certain of what exactly they are looking for, they can take a look at the web hosting articles featured on the site, which in detail explain various terms which might not make a lot of sense if you are new in the business. Are you looking for overseas hosting, or perhaps want to know exactly what the difference is between dedicated and shared hosting? Take a look at the articles section.

The design of the site is not amazing, but its efficient, and you get the feel it has been around for a long time, which brings credibility to the site. I would look into the site design if I were the site operator, but why fix something that works?

I would have liked to be able to find any kind of search function as well? A website without search? I wanted to check out another web host I use, Mediatemple, but I could find no such thing as a search-function. That was mildly irritating, but I got lost in the actual site as well and reading about other sites I’ve had hosting with or I have thought about using.

The footer boasts of more than 7000 articles, which should be enough to suit anyone looking for web hosting information.

On a sidenote: I’m glad to see that Bluehost is the best web host at the time of writing this review, which in fact is the hosting company for this very blog Good job Bluehost!

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How to find quality web hosting

Once you have finished working on your design, its time to optimize your code. Cleaning a CSS file manually can be very cumbersome and you might end with strange results, going back and forth in your backups to put in a style you should not have removed.

I was about to embark on this task anyway, when I decided to do a little Google search, and actually found a Firefox Extension developed by Sitepoint.

It’s called Dust-Me Selectors and gives you a tool to automatically search a site for its CSS styles and then present you with a list of redundant styles.

See here for the list it gave me of a site I had been working on, putting selectors in and out, and making it a big mess:

The tool itself is very simple to use, after installing it in Firefox you get a nifty little broom tool in the bottom of your window.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

The tool has many nifty features, such as searching your entire site via your sitemap (.xml format or HTML sitemaps are recognized). This helps you if you have a lot of differently designed subpages, so it does inadvertently advise you to clean a selector you were actually using on a different part of your site.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

The tool is fairly small and uncomplicated, but it does give you the exact tools you need for cleaning your CSS style sheets.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

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Tool to clean your CSS