Eid Mubarak, Salam Aidil Fitri, Salam Lebaran: This Raya has been mostly about driving here and there for my family and I. On the eve of Aidil Fitri, I drove to my office and then back to my house to pick up my wife and son and then we drove to Malacca to pick up my in-laws.

On the first day of Aidil Fitri, I drove to the mosque and then to Tesco, both in Shah Alam. On the second day, I drove to KL to pick up the MPV and then drove to Central Market looking for some buttons and then drove back to Shah Alam followed by a drive to Port Dickson for a picnic and then back to Shah Alam.

On the third day, I drove to KLIA LCCT to send my father in-law off to Pekan Baru and then drove to Kuala Lipis to spend some times with my mother and after that drive, my brother in-law took over the driving duty and I designated myself to be the navigator only. So he drove from Kuala Lipis back to Shah Alam and a few other places as well.

The final drive for me was yesterday, which was only a few hours ago, where we sent back the MPV to the owner who landed at LCCT from Jakarta and then drove back to Shah Alam, which we just arrived today. Where will I be driving to later today?

Kisahberuang.com updated to WordPress 2.6.2: Finally, the Fantastico De Luxe gave me the option to upgrade to 2.6.2 from 2.6.1. Even though this blog is not really affected by the security issues on 2.6.1, I just want it to be up to date. Some of you might ask why I didn’t go for the auto update plugin. I tried it and I just do not like it.

Contact Form replaced: Previously this blog was using the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP contact form but I found it to be too messy and then when someone left a comment telling me that the contact form was not working, I replaced it with Easy Contact. I have successfully tested it.

Holiday Mood: I am still on leave from work until end of the week so if this blog is not updated regularly, then you know why. Anyone has to work today?

Kisahberuang.com was down for about 10 hours today due to, according to the hosting company, SQL exceeded some limits bla bla bla… I believed many regular visitors were getting the site not found or something not found error. That was bad. Really bad! Thank God I was busy at work today and therefore, less time to nag the hosting people. Apparently, all of their customers were affected too. Duh!

When it finally went up, I found that only the main domain was up. My family blog and my wife’s online shopping blog that are hosted on the sub-domains of Kisahberuang.com were still down. The default answer given by the hosting people is, “Still checking for solution…” Duh!

I hate waiting and do nothing while some people were looking for solution. I didn’t even think that they are still working at midnight anyway. So, I decided to take the matters into my own hands. While going through the cPanel and Fantastico, I noticed that the upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 option was available. Therefore, without hesitation, I upgraded this blog.

Well that was not the solution to the sub-domains problem. I continued my quest and still I could not find anything missing even after I compared each files from the sub-domains to the main domain. Everything looked normal. As if I knew what to look for…

That called for drastic action! I deleted all the sub-domains and added them back with the same name hoping that it would just know where to get whatever necessary to bring back my other blogs. I remembered reading somewhere that the DNS needs time to refresh so, I left them alone for awhile.

Believe it or not! All my sub-domain blogs are back online now.

Any advise from any expert out there?

*Nice wordpress logo from 3nhanced.com.

Every time I logged in to my dashboard, there would be a link to upgrade my WordPress from 2.5.1 to 2.6. Eventually, last Monday I could not resist it anymore and bravely (may be stupidly would be more appropriate…) click to upgrade via the Fantastico. Well, I said bravely because that would be the first time for me doing such a thing and stupidly because I did not do my research first.

Anyway, the upgrade took only a few seconds and once I refreshed my blog, everything seemed to be in order. That remained true until I clicked on one of the posts link and ka-boom! I got the shock of my life. Not just any kind of shock but it was one of those monkey kind of shock. Terkejut beruk, if I were to say it in my mother tongue.

I asked my hosting support and they suspected it was a database problem and after about 3 days of trying this and that and with myself getting from shocked to annoyed, the hosting support finally found that the problem have been reported by many others who upgraded to 2.6. Thanks to KG Lim of eSurge Network who pointed me to that and for trying hard to resolve the issue.

The problem had nothing to do with the database but it was due to the permalinks. For those who have been using the default format, then they would not get the problem. Any other format would give you the 404 page not found error.

If I have done more research before the upgrade, I would have found out that there is a temporary fixed (before 2.6.1) that have been posted at the WordPress.org Support Forum. There are three ways to get rid of the 404 problem:

1. If you’re using Linux/Apache on your webserver, you don’t really need the index.php anyway. Try removing it. The index.php thing was only meant for IIS servers, which don’t support mod_rewrite.
2. If you need/want the index.php to be there, then on the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.
3. (For advanced users only) If you want to patch the problem yourself, there is a fix available in trac ticket 7306.

I tried the first one and my whole blog could not even load and the third one is too complicated for me. Therefore, I went for the easiest solution, which is the second one, and things were back to normal.

Despite the three day loss, it was a great experience for me!