The Four-eyed Journal » WordPress

Thesis 1.8.2, Jetpack and few other updates

jhay — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:05:07 +0000

After weeks of being pushed back, this blog is now running on the latest version of the Thesis theme framework which has been rolled out since last month. Yes, contrary to what most believe, the Thesis theme framework is still alive and kicking.

The latest version is Thesis 1.8.2 which I was able to implement rather easily earlier this afternoon. The problems I ran into were caused by third-party plugins like the W3TC which handles the caching needs of this blog and the WordPress Firewall plugin which, well handles the firewall protection.

After disabling both plugins to make way for the upgrade, everything went according to plan and it’s just a matter of waiting for Amazon’s CDN network to fully propagate all the changes made to the theme files and everyone should have no problems with the site’s layout. If you still do see some quirks or CSS disasters, do drop me a line. I’d very much appreciate the help.

Putting on Jetpack

Afterwards, I installed the Jetpack plugin from Automattic which incorporates the WordPress.com stats plugin along with other plugins like Sharedaddy, Gravatar hovercards, etc.

It was worth the switch or upgrade as I’ve noticed a great improvement in the load times of the backend or WP Admin area of this blog. Plus, the upgrades to the WP.com stats plugin itself is a great treat.

What else? A few code clean up with the CSS and custom hooks this and there all designed, at least intended, to make this blog purring along smoothly.

That’s it for this blog update bulletin. Now back to our regular programming.

Finally, integrated Facebook & Twitter Login to WordPress comments

jhay — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 04:13:31 +0000

Some view it as WordPress’ challenge to the Facebook Comment Box I on the other hand see it as a positive response to a need of WordPress users; allowing readers to easily add comments using their Facebook or Twitter credentials without the need for a third-party plugin.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against those third-party plugins that do just that, but seeing how this feature has become so common nowadays, it has become a de facto must-have for blogs. So it makes perfect sense that Facebook and Twitter login options be integrated into the WordPress comment widget.

It saves us bloggers from the hassle of finding the right plugin that does this job, it saves us from the trouble of resolving plugin conflicts if it arises, it saves us from the other trouble of messing around with theme files in order to make the plugin work the way we want it. Ultimately, one less plugin running under the hood makes a WordPress blog more secure and stable.

For now this feature is available to WordPress.com users and would soon be released for those self-hosted WordPress users like me via a plugin or as part of a future version of Jetpack.

Kudos to the WordPress team for this wonderful update!

Moved to a new web host - Along with my other blogs

jhay — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:27:01 +0000

You may have noticed that this blog has been down and acting a lot weirder for the past 5 hours or so. Reason is, I have just moved The Four-eyed Journal, along with two other blogs to my very first VPS web hosting account.

I signed up for ServInt’s Essential VPS for $49.00 USD a month. Thanks to a coupon code, I got a 50% off discount for three months of managed VPS hosting. This allowed me to throw in cPanel/WHM option as this is the control panel I am most familar of using when it comes to managing the back end of my web hosting accounts.

The basic features of the package I got are:

50 GB Storage UPGRADED
30 GB Storage
1 TB Monthly Transfer
768 MB Guaranteed (1.5 GB Burst RAM)
Hardware RAID 10
CentOS 5 Operating System
4 IP Addresses
Unlimited Domains and User Accounts
FREE cPanel, Plesk, or Parallels SBP
FREE Virtuozzo Power Panel
FREE Daily Off-Server Backups

Fantastic ServInt support

The migration started at around last midnight, but most of the hard work were done by ServInt’s awesome support team. They moved all three blogs that I wanted to host on the VPS account from the shared hosting accounts I currently use.

Jaypee and other ServInt customers were right, their customer support were available 24/7, very knowledgeable and felt like they were buddies of mine. Being a completely newbie to virtual private server hosting, they made the migration and transition an experience well worth the money.

I’m not saying it was easy, for I had a few problems with this blog in particular. After the ServInt support team completed the migration, it was just supposed to be a simple matter of pointing my .com.ph domain to my VPS’s custom name servers and wait for the DNS propagation to complete.

I screwed up WordPress

Lo and behold, the front page loaded fine but the permalinks were broken and some of the plugins had permission problems with the server. It was mainly my fault because the WordPress installed via Fantastico was version 3.0 while the database from old hosting account was exported out of WP 3.0.1 and I forgot to upgrade the default installation before restoring the database and plugins which broke the site.

I started from scratch, uninstalling and re-installing WordPress via Fantastico again but had another problem with the auto-upgrade feature. It turned out that I needed the suPHP module to be installed on the VPS for it to function seamlessly. Once more, ServInt’s fantastic support came to my rescue and configured everything.

The second start-from-scratch was the last for the upgrade to WP 3.0.1 was problem-free and the restoration of the theme files, plugins and database also went hitch-free.

So now, you’re reading this post from a VPS-powered blog. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the page loads have improved considerably. The next thing to do is to closely monitor the server resources usage to see where I can fine tune and optimize this VPS.

Why I moved

As most of my blogging friends know, I had been to a number of shared web hosting providers before. The strange thing is, or maybe it’s just a bit of bad luck, after an average of six months, I get frustrated because of frequent and lengthy downtimes. It would have been understandable if this blog were among the highly-trafficked sites on the net but no, this is just your average blog. So paying for cheap web hosting is no longer made sense if you get so many headaches and problems from it.

Now don’t get me wrong, WPWebHost is a respectable host. It’s just that their support sucks and last month’s frequent down times just pushed me to the edge.

A VPS hosting account would give me much more peace of mind and the capabilities to focus on growing my blogs instead of worrying about downtimes. I’m sure some of you are all too familiar with this story. So if ever you’ve decided to move to a VPS hosting, give ServInt a try. They offer pretty decent specs for a reasonable price. But their awesome 24/7 customer support is definitely worth every penny.

Recover lost blog posts with Feedblitz & Google Reader

jhay — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:56:20 +0000

The most devastating damage this blog took from the recent hack attack + database screw-up was the lost of six month’s worth of blog posts.

Though my webhost has managed to provide me with a copy of my blog’s database before the hack attack took place, the backup was unusable. It sucks big time! So I had to be more resourceful and figure out a way to recover most if not all of the blog posts I’ve lost.

The first solution that came to mind was Google Cache. That neat service by Google wherein they keep a snapshot of the web pages it has indexed. So I tried that but unfortunately, Google has also cached the corrupt pages of my blog so it was also unusable.

My hopes of recovering those lost blog posts nearly died until I saw that my Google Reader has the last 16 posts I’ve posted. Yes, I do subscribe to my own RSS feed. I do this to see how my posts really look like via RSS.

Google Reader has a copy of all my published blog posts from years back.

Going back, I thought that if Google Reader had my last 16 posts, maybe it has all the posts I’ve ever published since I had long subscribed to my own RSS feed years ago. Thank the stars for Google Reader, it does have them! All posts from way back to February 2009 were still viewable via Google Reader.

While browsing how far Google Reader had copies of my past blog posts, I remembered another way of recovering the ones I’ve lost. That silent and almost forgotten feed subscription and newsletter service known as Feedblitz.

It allows blog readers to subscribe to their choice of blogs via email. A simple newsletter of sorts that delivers every published post to my subscribers via email. Then I remembered that I had my very first Gmail account subscribed to it way back just to see how my posts were displayed by Feedblitz. I logged in and I almost jumped for joy when every single post I’ve ever published were right there in my inbox complete with post styling, embedded images & videos to boot!

Thanks to FeedBlitz, I was able to archive my published blog posts in my Gmail account.

So now, it’s just a matter of copying posts both from Google Reader and Feedblitz to my blog and re-publishing them. This would also be a great opportunity to update some posts that need to be updated and fix the typos I’ve left unnoticed since then.

The only drawback to this method is that the comments and trackbacks the posts have collected over time have been lost forever. Which goes to prove that it’s still best to have a working backup, even multiple backups of your blog’s database.

Nonetheless, I’m content that there’s a sure way to recover the lost blog posts and in the coming years, I know better how to prevent this harrowing experience from happening again.

If you had your own share of blog hack attacks and other methods of recovering lost blog posts do share them for all to read and learn from.

From a hack attack to database problem

jhay — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:06 +0000

It’s one awful thing to another. Besides a hack attack that screwed up this blog, another issue showed up which caused another problem.

The symptoms were the same. My blog would display the title and header and the title of the most recent post, the rest of the page, the post content, sidebar and footer would just disappear. As if the page was cut short.

Knowing that the hacking issue has been dealt with, perhaps it’s time to take a look at the plugins I use. So one by one, I deactivated and reactivated all the 34 plugins actively being used by my blog.

It turns out that the culprit, was the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley. So I disabled it to get my blog back up and running normally again.

Compatibility issue with WordPress?

The idea of dropping that plugin and choosing a new one didn’t appeal to me because I’ve been using it for years and it has worked fine until today. It wasn’t really a compatibility issue with WordPress 2.8.5 as my other blogs which also uses the same plugin have never had any problems with it. This was assured by the plugin authors.

So upon their advice, I cleared the error logs in my hosting account and reactivated the plugin. Once the problem once more occurs, it would be logged and a clue to fixing this would be available.

And so the error log gave me the following message:

[27-Oct-2009 18:01:04] PHP Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in /home/jrocasco/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 431

Not knowing PHP that well and not knowing how to fix this, I’ve reported this to plugin author Mike. He then advised me to follow the steps enumerated by someone else who had the same problem years ago with the same PHP Fatal error message:

Always backup your database first in case!

There is a null or empty entry in the options table located in the wordpress database
To fix this you need to login to the cpanel and load the mysql database – phpmyadmin
Select the your wordpress database and choose the wp_options table on the left hand side
Select the browse tab at the top of the page
Show all entries and find the one with an empty option name
Delete the offending entry
This should fix your problem

So via phpMyAdmin, I browsed the wp_options table in my blog’s database and indeed, there was a null or empty entry that has been causing this issue. I deleted it, reactivated the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form plugin and I was relieved and happy to see that my blog had started to function normally again.

Now my blog is clean from malicious codes, security has been beefed up and all that is needed to do is to clean up the database over time, with the installation and removal of themes and plugins, have resulted in a database bloated with useless entries and as the master bloggers have said, bloated and dirty databases are often the source of blogging problems that could really wreak havoc in one’s blogging career.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve learned a lot about WP security and keeping things neat and lean. I’d be sharing this lessons in the coming posts real soon.

For now, it’s good to know this blog is up and running and go and I wish every blogger a safer blogging experience.

Update: The problem of a null entry in the wp_options table just won’t go away. So for now I’ve decided to stop using the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form plugin and replaced it with Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi. I still prefer the old contact form plugin but I can’t let it keep on taking down my blog. Hopefully, a fix for this issue would be available soon.