I’m hopeful I have an optimum (or optimummer) search solution for my blog- not that I care if you can find anything here, but its important that I do. Back in March I vented my frustration about the limits of WordPress search, yet despite the experiments with plugins, none of them really worked for me, […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by theilr
It’s been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed.
But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout.
Here’s where I drove around in circles today… for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org — this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish the new one there this week).
Since Mobiles have been part of the Horizon Reports since like 1776, and there is the nifty WPtouch plugin that elegantly makes WordPress sites display cleanly on not just iPhones, but other mobile platforms (my first play was last year and I have rolled into most of my WordPress sites).
I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago– it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by foreversouls
My blog crashed this afternoon.
I was not driving, but with some lucky bits of intervention and guessing, I was able to roll it over and get it back on the road. This was after spending a good chunk on Sunday on a side blog that had gotten hacked (By the way, Donncha’s Exploit Scanner was a crucial key to cleaning up that one, tho it needs a bump to WP 2.9.1).
But today’s episode of “Blog and Order” was a different game. I thought I’d share some of the things I did- but keep in mind that when something like this happens, there is rarely one single recipe; and like most, I try all kinds of things, though the whole box of tricks at the wall and see what sticks.
So I went to my own blog today to look something up (whatever that was, I now forgot), and the page took a long time of just whiteness, and then I got the dreaded HTTP Server Error 500 – which tells you nothing more than some script on your site is borked.
I looked at my resources on Dreamhost (I run a private server, meaning I can restart the server- that did not help– as well as allocated more RAM to the server — at more $$ over month). I could see that the CPU usage had begun climbing well above normal levels around 3:00 AM; but even throwing more RAM at the site, it still would not load pages.
Next I check other sites hosted on the same domain. They are fine, even one that is WordPress. Then I try a non WordPress URL on my site. That also loads fine. This tells me the problem is in WordPress.
I then download the server error log. The last entries are fill of “index.php: premature end of headers” — again this tells me nothing specific except that somewhere in the chain of PHP scripts WordPress loads when it builds you a page, something borked.
By the way- another Mac tip… access or error logs can be huge files, hard to open in a text editor (BBEdit was having issues with my 180 Mb access.log file); but if you open the file on the Console utility, it manages nicely, and even offers a nice filter option when you are trying to isolate a file name or a rogue IP address.
Maybe all of my billions of fans are frantically pressing reload? I let the server sit a while. Then I decide to take it offline- you can do this easily (I do this when doing a manual update by ftp because you have to remove key files in the process–) I have an alternate index.php file I use as a sign to hang on the door (you can see what it says). Everything in WordPress is routed through this single entry point, so some basic HTML:
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Carplips I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly […]
Darn, I should have gone by my usual route of trying things before I blog about them. In a previous post, I speculated about using WordPress and the Twitter Tools Plugin to add a hashtag to posts to either aggregate them (among multiple bloggers) or segrate them (for a single blogger with several sites). My […]
I had this idea to explore and honestly could not find a relevant use to even flesh it out, so am putting it out there in case others do. There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this […]
I’ve done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Slightlynorth My not so accurate radar is being tickled by some recent emerging technologies that some Big Shot may place as the next incremental digit following “Web”. Submitted for your approval, Mr Serling: A lot of talk of “real time search” The whole crazy growth of Twitter, Facebook, etc […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into […]
