I moved to nearlyfreespeech.net this week, from 000webhost.com. It is much faster, and now I won’t get popup ads.

While moving the site, I took the opportunity to upgrade to the current WordPress. I think I was on WP3.3 previously; now it’s on the current release. And now I’m on the current PHP, too. Nice.

Everything went pretty well. I had some fun with the wordpress part – updating the existing plugins, using wp-cli, fiddling around with my own plugins which had a few problems using deprecated WordPress functions…, doing surgery on other plugins, now abandoned.

I had to update from the old Twitter widget I had been using; it was still using the Twitter v1 API, which did not use OAuth. This API is no longer supported, so the widget wasn’t able to retrieve any tweets. I found a new one called… really-simple-twitter-feed-widget. And it was pretty simple, in the end. But I did have a problem: when pasting my token secret into the configuration box, I inadvertently had grabbed a leading space. Instead of pasting “XYZABC” as the token, I had pasted “_XYZABC”. But I didn’t realize this, because the textbox was masked, and all I saw was those dots.

The incorrect token secret caused all of the signatures generated by the widget to be invalid; therefore the Twitter API was rejecting them. I had to crack into *that* code as well, to diagnose this. Only printing out the token secret just before it was used to generate the OAuth1.0a signature showed me the light. After that, the new Twitter widget just worked! Sweet!

Finally, I got all the PHP squared away.

NFS is a cheap hoster, but easy? No. I don’t mind the lack of cPanel. I love the SSH access to my machine. Everything is possible on NFS; the trick is figuring out HOW to do stuff.

The last thing I got stuck on, in the move to NFS, was configuring http://dinochiesa.net to redirect to www.dinochiesa.net. The FAQ for NFS says that you can do it using “a hard canonical name”. But doesn’t say HOW to make that effective. Back and forth through the FAQ on the NFS site, to no avail.

At last, this blog post helped me.

1. Go to the Nearlyfreespeech UI ->Site->Select the site in question->Add a new alias e.g. dinochiesa.net
2. Once dinochiesa.net appears under the Site Name and Aliases table in the site menu, click the “Set Canonical Name” (on the menu on the right)
3. Select HARD Canonical settings and select www.dinochiesa.net

Thanks, Keith! I don’t know why this isn’t in the FAQ doc for NFS.