Luna Tail

I hate it when things don’t work. Pisses me off. Which is, actually, a good feature of a programmer and it’s why I’m fairly good at figuring out problems with my job.

Ever since about Wordpress 2.5, probably ever since it’s been included in Wordpress, two of my blogs would let me automatically upgrade the plugins, and the rest would not. Of course this has been driving me batty because, basically, I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to upload my plugins to my VPS every stinking time they need upgrading. And that is quite often, actually.  I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and I was hoping the issue would be fixed. Apparently it was not.

So off to Google I went to find out what in the world is going on. Finally I figured them all out.

This Site has the best information to fix the plugin upgrades.  Keith’s Automatic Plugin Info Page.  Of course, though, it didn’t work on all the blogs on my VPS that needed fixing.  But it did work on most.  The ones it didn’t work on I just had to adjust the information a little bit. Like one of them didn’t need the modification to the files.php file.. though I really don’t know why.

Anywho, even though I’m repeating what he says, I’m going to post here what I did to fix this so that I know for in the future when I have to apply it to every single new version of Wordpress that comes out, which is a pain in the rear, but I’ll do it because I hate it when things don’t work. Oh also.. I do not have FTP on my VPS, and I really don’t want to install an FTP server on my VPS because it’s just one more security hole that I really don’t need.

Here’s the process:

1. I adjust the permissions for the entire Wordpress installation.  I do wish I knew the proper and correct permissions settings, but you might want to try your own. If you need to, you can change everything to 777 temporarily for this to work, and then change back to 755 or whatever usually use.  I would love for someone to tell me exactly what I need permissions on all directories and files to be… but I haven’t found a good easy to understand tutorial about it yet. And the WP codex page doesn’t help me one swat.
2. Second I open the config.php file and add the following lines:

   define(‘FTP_SSL’, false);

   This is to force Wordpress not to use FTP for, like me, servers that don’t have FTP installed. And I cannot word it as well as the guy who commented on this post:

   There is a bug with WordPress 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 where the setting to use FTP over SSL can not be deactivated once activated. So no matter what changes you make to the config page in the GUI, it will not work. The only way to override that setting is to set FTP_SSL to False in the wp-config.php file as you mention above.

   So to get this to work, the above is necessary. And I found it so in all of my Wordpress installations.

3. I added the following line also to wp-config.php:

   define(‘WP_TEMP_DIR’, ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/upgrade’);

   This forces Wordpress to use the directory wp-content/upgrade to write temporary files needed for the plugin upgrades.  At this point I saved wp-config.php and went on to create the the upgrade directory.

4. I went in and created a wp-content/upgrade directory. In addition to creating the directory you’ll need to set the permissions (777?), and also set the group to apache. Apache needs to be able to write to this subdirectory.
5. Finally, and this is the step that I sometimes needed, sometimes did not. I opened the wp-admin/includes/file.php file and made the following changes:

   I searched for getmyuid(). There are two instances of getmyuid() in file.php. The first one is in the if statement that looks for the function getmyuid(). That one remains the same. It is something like if( function_exists(‘getmyuid’) && function_exists(‘fileowner’) ) {
   inside that if statement, however, you’ll find it again:
   if ( getmyuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {
   that needs to be changed to:
   if ( posix_getuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {
   For more information on this change, please refer here as he describes it better than I can!

If you do all these things… then the automatic plugin upgrade in Wordpress 2.7 should work. It is working for me, now, on all of my blogs. Finally! Of course it will be a pain to make these changes every time Wordpress upgrades. But I’m willing to do it, since I hose a number of blogs and it’s easier to do this fix than it is to upload all the new plugin versions to my VPS when they update.

Well I’ve been looking around for a feed reader that I really like. I like the idea of RSS but I haven’t really had any good experiences with reading feeds and organizing them and seeing them in a way that I like.

When I was looking into various feed readers I found mention of Feedly. It works in conjunction with Google Reader.  I’m not too crazy about Google Reader though I do use it some, and their calendar, and their mail. But I digress.  I looked more at Feedly and how it reads Google Reader and displays them in my Firefox web browser. So this is my brief little review of Feedly.

If you click the image on the left here, you will see a larger version of my Feedly screen. I have installed it as a Firefox plugin.  I like it a lot.. I changed the settings so that unread posts show up in red so I can easily identify them. I can read the posts and view the images and videos. I can also read the comments from in Feedly. If I want to post a comment, I click the blog entry  name, or the comment section, and it opens the post in a new tab where I can comment to my heart’s content.

You can see, in the image, new unread posts are to the right.  There are multiple views though… I can view all my feeds from the dashboard with new feeds marked. Or I can view latest posts chronologically, where all the blogs I follow are listed together in chronological order. Or I can view each blog individually.

I do wish it would notify me of new posts.. but perhaps that will come in time. I have set my Feedly page to be my home page so I can just hit Home when I want to see my feeds.  And they are all right there!

I can even add and delete feeds right from Feedly so I don’t even see, or have to visit, Google Reader itself.

So far, so good! I hope to no longer miss my friends’ blog posts!

This is just a picture of one of the last roses outside on my rose bushes. I kinda think they are a pain… but pretty for the most part. If they died, though, I wouldn’t be too sad. Okay maybe a little.

Yesterday was a great down day and I woke up this morning feeling much better. Physically, emotionally and mentally. But as I sit here again on the couch (I seem to get stuck on the couch once I start blogging) my neck is just killing me.

I’m sure it’s still because of my car accident. I got the car back, it’s up for sale already. I hope it sells, I haven’t gotten any bites yet. But my arms still go numb when I lay on my back, or have them above my head, or sit for any length of time.. all of which must be bad. I was going to go to the neurologist last Tuesday but they put me off again until this Wednesday. I really need to go in. I’m still in a lot of pain and discomfort and I want to be better. So we’ll see how that goes.

I upgraded the memory on my VPS (server, host, whatever you want to call it) by 256Mb. I hope that helps. It’s not flash memory but regular old memory. So now I’ll have 768Mb and we’ll see if that speeds up the websites some. I might have to ask those I host for to give me a wee bit of money to cover costs. Maybe $6 or $10 every three months or so. Not really too much, just enough to help when my bill comes due.

I think I’m going to flop over and take a nap now. Sitting on the couch makes me sleepy.

I want to make more money. Yeah I know I know… there is an issue that I have to actually consider first, which is spending less money. Like on buying a MiniVan. My husband isn’t working right now, but we were joking, the other day, about how our (my) spending habits haven’t changed much, we are not too strapped… considering I just bought a Minivan. LOL And I walked out of the dealer without giving them a dime. Pretty impressive. When I talked to a guy at my credit union about the loan, he told me my credit score is 805. Max is, I guess, 850 or so, so I have pretty darn good credit. People love to loan my money.

But I don’t like loans, or debt, that’s why I don’t have much. Just the mortgage now and this new minivan. But anyway, I want to optimize my blogs for more income and I’m not sure how. As I don’t really like that many ads all over the place. And the ones I do have don’t seem to sell very well anyway!

Maybe I just should focus on content. Lately I’ve been focusing on restoring my VPS, that is where all my time has gone. That, and doing dog sports. But the dog sports are winding down now, and I hope to have a bit more time. Maybe I can use some of that time to do some blog optimization.

Bleh.. I’m having a hard time optimizing my server since the host’s hard drive failure. I swear last time I had the memory optimized just fine, but now my memory gets stucked up no matter what settings I seen to use.

It seems like it’s mostly Apache. These are my settings:

StartServers 3
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
ServerLimit 100
MaxClients 100
MaxRequestsPerChild 200

and I have keepalive on, MaxKeepAliveRequests 1000, and KeepAliveTimeout 3
and still my memory usage spikes to 373916 on a regular basis… and the memory doesn’t seem to want to release. Most of my processes appear to be apache, according to the TOP command. I’ve been watching. If I restart apache, the memory usage goes way down, then climbs steadily back up again as the server runs for a while and apache processes start up again.

I am not getting into the server’s swap memory, thank goodness. And I know that 512K isn’t that much memory. But to increase it, I might have to go to the next higher package, and that’s a huge increase in price, which I don’t want to do.

I actually broke my MySQL database yesterday. Though it seems to have repaired itself… go figure. I’m going to need to get some drug treatments for myself soon, the server stuff is driving me nuts. So yup, drug rehab will be in order for me!

Oh if you don’t know what LAMP stands for…. it stands for Linux Apache MysQL and PHP. Which is what most servers are, nowadays.

Well, I am still in the thick of restoring all my sites. Unfortunately, I may have completely lost the database for UtahDogs.com. Bleh! I am still looking for a backup but it’s not looking very good. That sucks, it’s an old site.. been around since 2000. So I really hope I don’t loose all that.

Though data is just data, not really real anyway. And I’ll be in St. George this weekend doing flyball, so I won’t be able to do any restoring. Maybe I should do some futures trading instead of blogging.

Oh well. Life goes on. This blog is almost fully recovered now. I don’t remember what I had on my sidebars, so they are a bit bland. It’ll come, though.

I’m listening to Twilight, book on CD. It’s pretty good so far. A bit too mushy.. yeah even for me! But I love vampire stories for sure. I would love to meet a friendly vampire someday.

Okay.. I am still trying to understand and use OpenIDs. At long last, I think I finally understand.

So an OpenID has to be in the form of a URL. Big thing that was tripping me up, lol. And there are places where you can register your OpenID and they kinda are like an OpenID host. You sign up with them and they give you an OpenID that you can use to log into various websites that support OpenID.

I like Beemba so far. I have my own Beemba OpenID. So when I go to various websites, I use my Beemba OpenID to log in (yes, I have to log into Beemba so you can’t, even if you know my Beemba OpenID) and then voila, I’m in via OpenID.

And if you click the link to see my Beemba OpenID, you’ll see various information about me, too. And this is what I’ve been wanting! Instead of clicking my OpenID and seeing just a site, with nothing about me, that’s boring. This lists my FriendFeed info, Twitter, Del.icio.us info, and my website address and my picture of Tatum.

So far, so good!

And now for my relaxing weekend… ha! Well, not so much. Maybe Sunday afternoon. I reserved some books from the library… gonna check out Dennis C Carey too, see what he’s all about. I want some books on CD too to take with me when I got to Laramie the weekend after the 24th of July, so maybe they’ll be some good ones!

Not in my human brain.. fortunately. Well, actually, that’s just about gone and I have a hard time remembering things anyway. But specifically I’m talking about the RAM Memory on my VPS.

Figuring a Bob stroller won’t really help my memory problems, I pulled up Google (Yeah it’s evil, but it’s the best) and started to have a look around.

Looks like Apache is my biggest memory hog. And figuring my VPS is only used for web things, that is understandable. I don’t use the VPS for anything else other than a web server! So it’s time to tune up Apache, and maybe MySQL, to see if that helps my memory issues.

Right now, after a bit of tuning, my WebMin reports:
512 MB total, 348.22 MB used

I’ve been getting up to 500MB used, which is bad. And I’m getting Out Of Memory errors and my blogs are slowing down. So… in order to help this out, I changed some settings in Apache:
StartServers 6
MinSpareServers 3
MaxSpareServers 10

From what I’ve been reading, this should help. Originally it was set ti 8 4 and 20, respectively. I really would like processes killed off (MaxSpreServers) when they are idle. Instead of being held to see if they will be used again. I am not sure how important this is for my blogs, but I guess I’ll find out.

So far, so good… I still am at
512 MB total, 348.55 MB used

So I’ll be watching this for a bit to see how if it helps. I hope so.

For a long time now I’ve included the www. in my domain name URLs. Recently… probably less than a month ago, I decided that I would get rid of the www and see how I liked it.

I have my server set up so that if you put the www in, it’ll still find my websites. So no one will get lost! But I really, really like having no www on my domain names. The www is just messy, more to type, and takes up too much room in the domain name.

So it’s gone! What do you think? Do you keep the www or do you drop it on your domains?

Now that my blogs are upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress, my emails are cleaned out (I have over 600 in my trash… ugh) and I’ve posted a post or two, time to go watch a movie and wish I had wall mounted home theater speakers to go along with my HDTV!

I’m a member of both Entrecard and SezWho. I joined up with SezWho about a month or so ago because I saw a post about it over on Eyespi20 and it looked like a good commenting system. And I’d already played around with Intense Debate and Disqus, as you might know if you read my blog off and on.

Well I didn’t like that Intense Debate and Disqus stored my comments off my blog. I like having ownership of my own comments. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak… okay, I know I’m a bit of a control freak. So I like to have my comments stored here, on my server, with my blog. And so I switched to SezWho.

I like the idea of having a commenting community, and SezWho provides that in a good way. They are growing, too, and I hope to be able to meet and keep friends lists on SezWho. I really don’t like their Red Carpet Widget, though, it’s big and cumbersome, so i am not using that on my blogs. But I like the SezWho environment and community.

So I think it’s great that Entrecard and SezWho have partnered. Now if you post a comment on a SezWho enabled blog, you earn Entrecard Credits. Which is very cool! Though I post comments on other blogs regarldess of that. But hrm.. maybe it will inspire me to post more comments on those blogs!