Leigh :) Stark
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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
WordPress scheduling woes and an unlikely fix
Monday, September 5th, 2011
Over the past week, I’ve noticed a problem with one of the WordPress sites I maintain.
Perhaps you’ve seen it: articles set to go live somehow miss the schedule.
You swear they should go live, and yet “Missed schedule” still manages to pop up in red screwing up your plans for a planned post.
When it started happening to me, I frantically checked the server time and found nothing wrong. I checked to see if there were any new plugins and nothing had been changed. And then, at last, I Googled, and the results I got were so different from what actually resolved my woes.
If you’re getting this problem, a search on Google will tell you to:
Solution 1: Add a line of text to your wp-config.php file
If you Google “wordpress schedule fix” enough times, you’ll eventually find your way to this:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/scheduled-posts-still-not-working-in-282?replies=13#post-1175405
That’s pretty much the first thing you’ll want to try. It’s a simple fix in theory, with the addition of one line to the config file.
It didn’t work for me, however, so I looked for another solution.
Solution 2: Modify the cron.php file in wp-includes
This fix is a little more annoying. It’s not recommended that you go in and start changing files that are central to the operating of WordPress, especially since an update will wipe out any changes you’ve made and force you to do them again. That said, if the first solution doesn’t work, you’ll eventually find this one, which can be found below:
http://pauloflaherty.com/2011/05/23/fix-for-wordpress-missing-scheduled-posts/
Once again, this didn’t work for me. So I made a few more searches and found something else.
Solution 3: Install a WordPress scheduling fix plugin
Apparently, this whole WordPress scheduling thing is more common than you think. For the most part, it generally appears randomly and most people diagnosing it tend to believe it has a lot to do with out-of-date plugins, broken themes, and server settings.
Because those reasons will almost certainly never be the same, it doesn’t happen to everyone and is hard to diagnose.
So there are a couple of plugins available on the WordPress plugins site that deal with this. I never tried any of them, mostly because I didn’t want to confuse the issue and throw more plugins than were required.
You’re certainly welcome to try, however, as the plugins are available from the following links:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-missed-schedule/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/missed-schedule-wordpress-plugin-fix/
Sadly, none of these three solutions actually worked for me.
That’s not to say that these solutions don’t work at all, as the resources I pulled them from indicate the contrary. However for my site, they didn’t make a dent.
So what did?
The solution
Originally, I had planned to take a backup of the site, shift that over to a test site, and then see if I could replicate the problem. And then just I was beginning to download the files, I took a gander through my error log to find out what was going on.
Some of the lines seemed to indicate exactly what was happening, and that was a crash was occurring in one of the tables and a part of the database needed to be repaired.
A repair job? That sounds like a job for phpMyAdmin!
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t quite sure where to start, as overhead was new to me. However, a quick Google search came up with this:
http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-quickie-repair-mysql-tables-in-phpmyadmin
If you go into the database you’re using for WordPress, you should be able to see the overhead. Simply put, if you clear the overhead from those tables, your WordPress installation starts to work again, or it did in my case.
Tags: support, wordpress
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Leigh’s Mobile Gallery
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
If you actually visit my site (which doesn’t have a lot on it, apologies… sorta going through “stuff” at the moment), you may have noticed a few things on the top have changed.
One is that I now have a CV up there… so you know, if you’re looking to hire me, use that and my review list to determine if I have any worth (to you; I have worth, you just might not see it for your purposes).
The other is that I’ve now relaunched my gallery under a different system. It’s taken a few weeks and it looks very shiny. Apologies to people suffering for loading images, it can be seen as a fairly bandwidth intensive site but I like the look & effect of it.
As of yesterday, however, I’ve modified the WPTouch default theme / plugin for WordPress and now have a mobile version of my gallery running.
To see it, simply type “spore.leighlo.com” (without the quotes) into your mobile’s web browser. I’ve tested this on Safari on the iPhone but if you’ve got other devices, feel free to tell me how it looks.
More images of it after the jump…
Tags: wordpress
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Thursday Design & Graphic Linkfest!
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
To shed my Firefox of its weight (because I have hundreds of tabs open), here are some of the links you might want to look at this week (but only next week if you’re feeling… sexy):
If you’re not yet aware of the genius that is the site Smashing Magazine, please introduce yourself to it now. It is a must have for designers and graphic-lovers alike. If you’re into WordPress (which I know many of you are), then it’s got a lot there you can work with.
For instance they give you help for testing your new site, have a nice detailed list of lots of brilliant free fonts (get into your typography now… this is the first time I’m telling you), and a great page on WordPress theme frameworks to help you build that brand spankin’ new WordPress theme you’re thinking of doing (more on that later in the page).
SpeckyBoy has an interesting set of bits and pieces on its site. It doesn’t seem to be a feature-laden as Smashing Magazine, but it’s still quite a good site regardless.
I don’t use Joomla anymore, but these nice templates might help someone who does. WordPress is better than Joomla, though, and here’s how to make it a lot more professional by way of plugins. And if you’re into your photography, you’re either a Lightroom user or a Photoshop user (the two are very different). So if you’re a user of Adobe’s blend of Bridge, Photoshop, RAW Conversion, and ease-of-use, you might want to look up this list of Lightroom presets. The Photoshop junkies might want to get their head around HDR instead.
There’s also the inspiration to love typography. I love my fonts. Do you love your fonts? How about your words? Do you dig ‘em yet? 
Tags: design, graphics, links, wordpress
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WordPress: CityRail never looked so good…
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Ok so after scabbing so many WordPress themes, I’m now going to try my hand at creating one of those nifty premium style themes.
It of course will be free, and probably poorly designed since I’m not a designer.
But here’s the first Photoshop piece of my first WordPress theme: “You Fool! You Crossed The Yellow Line!”
"You Fool! You Crossed The Yellow Line!" is technically the second CityRail theme I had planned... it's just the first to come out of my Photoshop session...
There’s already a box under the two articles there that could essentially be used for a 4-5 square Flickr plugin and I’ll probably add a gum artwork or dirty ticket above the menu. The main section at the bottom should always be there according to this design, similar to how MNML works.
Some comments would be nice though, since I’m not a designer and this is my first real design.
In case anyone is wondering, the design of the station platform comes from how it looks at Bondi Junction (seriously, look down when you’re there) and while I took photos for inspiration, all of the textures and panels have been generated in Photoshop.
Tags: static gelato, sydney transport, theme, wordpress
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Goodbye Serendipity, Hello WordPress
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Today marks the day that I jump ship and head towards a different blogging platform.
For the past few years, I’ve been using Serendipity, a very capable and extremely well-made open-source blogging platform. Several years before I started Leighlo.com, I’d run a couple of my own blogs on different engines. Each of these tended to be inflexible, irritating, and useless at resisting Spam. When I got my hands on Serendipity, though, I thought that I’d finally found a team that new what they were doing.
Serendipity was brilliant. It was fast, strong, and secure, and it gave me some level of customisation that my puny Earth brain could wrap itself around.
But in recent months, my love for Serendipity has started to lessen.
As I use WordPress more and more for my work at The Gadget Grill, the size of the community as well as it’s sheer ability to be modified makes me want to move. I’ve been using Serendipity a while and now it’s time to move on.
I have a new design, a new logo, and the ability to add some cool features like Twitter… because no one Twitters more than a freelance tech journo.
Well, maybe a porn star.
Or John Mayer.
Regardless, moving from Serendipity is a little hard so in case anyone’s thinking about switching over too, here’s a link you’re going to need.
There’s an early version of this converter floating around… version .7 or .8 or something and it just doesn’t work. It’s not if you have a large blog in the slightest and doesn’t seem to work well. So this dobschat bloke has gone and made it better and it actually works.
A couple of notes though:
- If you ever used those parentheses codes, you’re out of luck. Posts with those will come up with the [img] or [url=yaddyadda] in the actual writing as it has here.
- Be careful with what type of permalinking you set up on WordPress because the directory structure could mess around with image & multimedia linking in posts.
- Anything you’ve left as a “draft” in your blog entries will now be published. So… you know… if you’ve got that as a situation, you’ll need to go through one active installation of Serendipity to fix things while setting up the WordPress one.
- If you used some of Serendipity’s statistics plugins, you’ll lose all of those hit counts. You might also lose any links Google have made to you, but that’s expected with the transition to a new page.
But that’s about it. Brilliant work, imports the comments and pages with all the dates intact. I have my blog in a new form and now it’s ready to go!
Well sort of. I’m sure I’ll be cleaning out the non-WYSIWYG codes out of older posts for agggeeeeesss.
Tags: s9y
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