Well, sometimes because of the way Wordpress eats up memory, sometimes because of something else.. the cache!

When you see that your blog is running a bit slow (it happens in shared hosting, and especially with memory eaters) you immediately think about cacheing. If you don’t think on your own, then you might complain to Dreamhost’s Support Service, file a ticket, and they will do the thinking for you.

Now, what they don’t know.. is that, while cacheing is a good concept, apparently the Wordpress cacheing plugins are troublesome. After checking all of my plugins (of course, not checking exactly the right one) reading about it and then some more, I tried disabling my WP Super Cache plugin (it’s an enhanced version of WP Cache, but the later is still problematic. Bingo! No more 500 Internal Server Errors.

PS: Yes, I’ve been thinking of ditching Dreamhost for MediaTemple. But no! Stick with something good enough, willing to help out (Dreamhost’s Support Service always seemed to have a collaboration attitude) and try to improve the situation. Moving around can only mean trial and error.

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments
Filed under: Hope, How To, Online, Why, WordPress
Tags: 500 internal server error, cache, dreamhost, feat, fix, mediatemple, php, plugin, webhost, WordPress

Why down?

• Reason: Dreamhost
• Specific Reason: Dreamhost’s Databases
  • They never acknowledged this on their notification site. Why?
• Reason: Caught the flu.. after all, it’s breathin’ Scandinavian air
• Side Reason: Wordpress is a memory hog!!!!!!

What do we have here?!

In short:

• a normal PHP-CGI process on Dreamhost’s servers takes around 10 MB of memory
• PHP-CGI Wordpress process.. up to 30 MB
• ZenPhoto 10 MB
• Habari 10 MB. I’ll be darn if people won’t start moving to it if Wordpress doesn’t fix its shit
  • WP loads so much stuff into $GLOBALS.. Give me a break!
  • I wish WP would start to reform its code, and then have a programme like Facebook’s
  • Habari is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!! Neat, simple, mannered with good standards..
• For the first time Dreamhost support was more than 24h late to reply to my support ticket
• I wasted my time with this, I had a nice mojo breakdown and ate sandwiches all day..
• I went back to the shell and Midnight Commander
• I had some quick UNIX bash lessons
• I ended up installing OpenGoo (tipped by the Rux)
• I now have to apologize to Aron
• Yes, I got the Gmail Themes also, one day behind the official roll-out, and I have the coolest theme ever: classic!

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments
Filed under: Hope, Online, Review, Support, Why, WordPress
Tags: wordpress memory hog dreamhost habari php cgi

One of the bugs is that the administration menus don’t link correctly any longer.

Open orgSeries.php, and replace the function series_organize_options (line 156) with the following:

(...)
Read the rest of Organize Series for Wordpress 2.6 (165 words)

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments
Filed under: How To, Online, Review, WordPress
Tags: fix, plugin, revisions, series

That actually caused my series plugin to break down, but that was fixed by me with two edits.

But the main part is that.. weirdly.. the Wordpress team didn’t put an option to disable these, as they can create useless data records. I, for one, like the feature, but I don’t see myself using that.

It’s neat for publishers and multi-user blogging, when people review and edit and add photos, etc.. one person at a time. But when there’s just one person doing it.. it’s close to useless. I couldn’t care less how this post looked like one day or one month ago..

So the only way to turn the feature off is to edit your wp-config.php file and put

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

But what about those revisions left in your database? Several posts look as if they found the true answer, but it’s one of those “The one who laughs last, laughs best” situations. Didn’t those people hear about post meta? Or about post terms (tags, categories, or series?! )?¹

Here’s the proper way to clean your MySQL DB for Wordpress from post revisions.

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Read the rest of Delete Wordpress 2.6 Revisions (34 words)

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | 16 comments
Filed under: How To, Online, WordPress
Tags: clean, database, feat, fix, mysql, php, revisions

One plugin does just that. It allows you to have the same interface, same Wordpress quality (the interface is the exact same one, hosted at wordpress.com) by registering your blog in their database.

The only downside to it, is that it tries to load the interface in an inner frame, which not only looks bad, but is a bit uneasy for the user.

So I decided for some code changes: instead of loading it with iframe, why not just redirect to it? You can then simply go back to your self-hosted dashboard through the Dashboard link.

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Read the rest of Wordpress.com Stats (42 words)

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | No comment
Filed under: Online, Review, WordPress
Tags: plugin, stats

Unfortunately I’m starting with the left foot, since this post will also be part of the Junk category.

One useful plugin with 9 lines of coding allows you to make a page or a post to redirect the visitor to another location.

I installed it for future use - I will soon change the Photos page to be a media gallery and I didn’t want the gallery to be embedded in the blog.

After installation: Buff! Warnings about a file being required but not found. And I start to think: what a simple plugin and still with bugs!

(...)
Read the rest of Redirect (346 words)

© Andrie, 2008. | Permalink | No comment
Filed under: Junk, Online, Review, WordPress
Tags: attitude, criticism, plugin, principles, redirect