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For the most part, it generally appears randomly and most people diagnosing it tend to believe it has a lot to do with out-of-date plugins, broken themes, and server settings.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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New theme: Spontaneous Box

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Have you ever wanted to show what’s really going on in your head?

I have, and I often find it hard to explain to people.

While I’ve been called “irreverent” before, I suspect I’m better explained with words like “eccentric”, “random”, and “spontaneous”.

The theme I’m talking about here that I’ve *mostly* finished development on is called Spontaneous Box (I say mostly because there are still some bugs I need to iron out with search, menus, paragraph sizing and some other bits).

Spontaneous Box has been built over an original theme created by Justin Marcus and has been modified to accommodate the degree of randomness I’ve been wanting in my personal site.

First off there’s the basic design which still carries over from the original: three columns, all showing different types of information.

As you can see, the left most column features written bits. Words, phrases, sentences, and blogs. Anything that I want to communicate through writing is left on… well, the left.

The middle column features my idea for a Tumblr-style blog. That is, now I can post images to my blog from my phone (using a WordPress application) and provided they sit in a certain category, they’ll appear in the middle column. There’s no need to manually click a features section as the template just looks for the three newest image entries and sticks them here.

One of the things I’ve modified from the original design is the requirement of custom codes. Don’t get me wrong, I like custom codes, but the last thing I’m going to remember when I’m posting from my phone is to write “1small” or “2medium” when I’m posting an image. As such, the theme has been modified to include the use of the plugin “The Attached Image” which happily grabs a medium image and sticks it here. No codes needed. Simple.

Finally, the last column includes a search box and a Twitter feed.

I’ve missed what happens at the top of each page, however: the slogan.

You see one of the things people don’t get about me is just how random I am. It’s as if I need an editor for my brain before I speak. In fact, past girlfriends and editors have even said as much.

In my last site design (which was a modified version of Elegant Theme’s “Glow”), I attempted to include the random phrases by including images. Lately however, I’ve been turned on to the idea of making sites font-friendly. I’m in love with typography, and with the help of “Ozh’ Random Words” plugin, I can pull that off all around the page.

For instance, my site header has over fifty different things it can possibly say. They’re all the sort of things I would say as… I’m just like that.

All you need to do is refresh the home page and it’ll take care of itself, refreshing a statement. Oh, and I’ll be updating the list from WordPress as time goes on because yes, I’m that random.

It’s not just the start page, however. The same sense of spontaneity is reflected over the various pages you may come across.

and…

Outside of this randomness, the page is designed to be clean and simple with a fairly fresh and modern font “Calibri”.

That said, I’m now working on a slightly less clean version of this theme called “A Tease Dress” which will be made for public consumption.

Tags: theme, wordpress
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The idea behind “Spontaneous Box”

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

One of the things I’ve been trying to do for a while is blend a Tumblr-style blog and a regular WordPress blog.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Tumblr is a short-form blog service designed for you to post single bursts of information in one hit easily.

Imagine if you saw a poster and you just suddenly wanted to put that online for everyone to see. You’re out and about with your phone and web savvy person that you are decides you’d like to take a picture of it and post it online for the world to see. You can always put it to Twitter and use a service like TwitPic or YFrog, or you can put it to your own site.

Tumblr is that sort of setup.

WordPress can do that too, but most of the templates you see are designed to show words better than images. There are some truly excellent Photoblog templates out there, including the stuff GraphPaperPress do and the wonderful (and free) Duotone theme, but these are generally designed for photos or galleries.

I wanted something that would let me post a combination of words and images, a showcase of what was going through my mind, so to speak.

For months, I’ve experimented with an MU installation that housed three blogs: one for words, one for Tumblr-style blogs, and one that collected the best of both and published it in a collected place. That “collected place” would have been my main domain.

However, the main problem I had come across was that you’d have to login individually. Despite WordPress MU (and WP3 with the integrated MU core) having a unified login setup, it was still a pain in the ass.

And then I found this.

Justin Marcus’s “New York, New York” is an excellent theme, and it suited my needs quite well. I found it the other day and knew instantly how I wanted to modify it.  He’s got some great code there, but I have a few things I’ve done differently…. as you’ll see in the coming post.

Tags: inspiration, photoblog, themes, tumblr, wordpress
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Woohoo! I’ve got my blog working again!

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Over the past few months, some things have happened.

First is that I no longer have a girlfriend. Long story short, we’re apparently not compatible so after all that, I’m pretty good.

Another is that I’m now a proper freelancer… which is weird to say the least.

Then there are the ridiculous amount of projects I’ve undertaken for myself, most of which are designed to make people smile. I’ll get to them shortly.

But in case you’ve been tuning in to see the weird-ass writing style of one Leigh Stark, you’ve probably been saddened to find the blog not updated. Well, that was mostly due to a glitch I kept running into that stopped me from using parts of the blog within the WordPress version I was running.

After some tweaking tonight with WordPress, plugins (usually the root of problems any WP user will suffer), and some effort, that looks like it’s fixed and I can start blogging again!

Woohoo!

So the other part of this is this: I’ve started to redesign my blog well & truly. The new design is based off of something you can go get at Elegant Themes, but I’ll be attempting to make it truly unique (or hoping to) as the days roll on by. And if not unique, then definitely me.

I’m back, ya’ll.

Tags: wordpress
Posted in News & Current Events | No Comments »

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…

(more…)

Tags: wordpress
Posted in Featured, Photography, Technology | No Comments »

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