Rotheblog had about 7 hours of downtime today

I have been meaning to try to figure out why the newest version of kPicasa doesn’t seem to work on my site. The developer said the most likely culprit is that one of my other plugins is conflicting with the Picasa WordPress plugin.

The main problem, is that I can only test this on the live Rotheblog site. I have been slowly working on getting Xamp installed, so I can do testing locally, but that takes time that I don’t seem to have.

So I came up with the idea today, what if there is a plugin that would reactivate all of the plugins at once, kind of like the feature to de-activate all of the plugins already built into WordPress 2.0+? I know that re-activating all of the plugins is a feature that will be part of WordPress 2.5 in march of 2008, but I can’t wait that long….

So, I found a plugin called “Activate-All” on a website called Mass-Automation. I had been here before, downloading plugins, so I trusted this website right away. I looked through the requirements, version 1.0 of Activate-All works with WordPress 2.0+, that’s me, and I glanced through the comments and I didn’t see anything negative. I did notice that the last comment was in Jan of ’07, but that doesn’t mean anything.

So, I downloaded the plugin, uploaded it to my WordPress install, activated it, and…..white screen!

Oh, Crap!

Now what, I didn’t back anything up before hand….well, don’t panic. Just rename the plugin and everything will be fine. I did that, and nothing happened. I deleted the plugin. Still nothing. Now what?

Well, I spent a ton of time trying to figure just that out. Come to find out as I read through all of the Activate All plugin page, it says lower down that this plugin does not work with WordPress 2.3. Crap. Why isn’t this listed by the requirements, and not in with the rest of the text? It was my fault for not reading further, I am ADD sometimes. But, I digest a lot of information in a given day, and sometimes I make quick decisions based on trust of a website like this one.

So, I contacted the developer and searched the WordPress forums. I also emailed my webhost to see if I could get a backup restored….and I waited. For about 7 hours. The developer of the plugin got into my website with a temporary ftp login, and he fixed it. What a nice guy, he didn’t have to do that at all considering it was my error.

He did say that the problem was the newer version of the kPicasa plugin. Apparently, when I activated “Activate All”, it activated every plugin I had on my site, including ones that I left deactivated while I tried to troubleshoot them. I knew kPicasa was throwing a php error, that is how this whole thing started, my question is, why did Activate All, activate every plugin immediately? Shouldn’t it have added a button for me to control that? Kind of like the “De-activate” all button? So, while I knew a white screen meant a php error, and that kPicasa was causing it, everything basically falls back on the fact that Activate All will trash your site if you use it for WordPress 2.3. Going back to, read everything and don’t be like me….

That is why there was downtime today. It really got me thinking about the responsiveness of my host. I still haven’t heard from him, and it is over 12 hours later. This is just not acceptable of TLCWE.com. Marty Hoskins can be helpful, but lately he has been non-responsive, and even when I do get a hold of him, it can take an hour or so. Granted, he is one guy and he does a good job of answering all support emails, but I am at a point where I need answers quicker, and I would be willing to pay a little more.

So, I am at a cross roads a little bit. I did some research today into Bluehost. I really like what they have to offer, and I may try to get both of my sites switched over to them. Plus, I learned what the terminology Add-On domains means…multiple websites hosted with one hosting account, which is something I really want to do.

For now, things are working again. Thanks for being patient today.

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Permalink changes have continued to mess up my blog

Periodically, I have been surfing my own blog, and have found that things aren’t working how they should be.

Like today, for example, I figured out that none of the links in the right hand sidebar would consistently work. It depended what you were viewing, and if you had already clicked a topic, none of the links would work. After I changed my permalink structure a few weeks back, all relative links no longer worked, they have to now be absolute. So, my javascript menus weren’t working because my link to the script file was relative, and subsequently, all of the links in the right side didn’t work because they were linking to relative variables. So, today, I changed the permalink structure yet again, including the month and the year in the path so I could link directly to past months of posts, like I do for my Daily Life section.

So, I apologize to those that have felt like navigating my site lately has been a terrible experience. I need help in finding these problems, and I know there are probably a ton of broken images still….not sure how to find the time to fix those when I have to go one by one. If you see something, visit my contact page and let me know about it so I can get it fixed and be a little less embarrassed as I learn on a live site.

But hopefully, for now, the right side links should work again and I’ll do my best to find any other problems the blog is having.

This month I had 4 Gigs of traffic, and over 2000 unique users. Supposedly:) That is what Cpanel says. I did recently activate Google Analytics, I need to check out what that says for the past week when I was gone to get a more accurate snapshot of my web traffic.

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Tutorial for setting up custom permalink structure in WordPress

Changing the permalink structure of my posts had been on my to do list for my WordPress based Rotheblog for quite some time, if not a month after I launched the redesign. I knew my apache server was configured with mod_rewrite available, so I didn’t have to worry about my server not supporting permalinking.

I had tried setting permalinks up once before, updating my permalink structure in the admin control panel interface, but unsure what to do next as my website links were broken. I thought maybe I had to give my .htaccess certain permissions to allow the system to write the rules to it, but I didn’t make time to explore it in depth. WordPress should update that .htaccess file for you when you change the structure, but double check. Download the file yourself and look.

Turned out today, I tried again without exploring much more in depth, and got permalinking to work. I was nervous, not completely understanding the mod_rewrite engine, that any dynamic links pointing to my site would now be broken. But, the rewrite works on those links, no matter where they are.

Originally, my links were the default, and looked like this;

Pengo Locked Up During Gameplay

I added these rules to my Options > Permalinks > Custom Field

/%post_id%/%postname%

This will use the unique post id and then add it to the slug name of the post, which is dynamically generated from the title of the post. (Or it can be entered manually) My links will now look something like this;

www.rotheblog.com/1611/enabling-setup-permalinks-structure-wordpress

Then, all I did was download my empty .htaccess file from the server, and add these rules to it, and publish;

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I found that these two sites were all I needed to setup my permalinking structure

1. WordPress Codex
2. Perishable Press

Now, I can have those keyword rich search engine friendly link titles available to use to my advantage.

For those of you who zoned out in the first sentence and are asking, “How does this affect me?” It doesn’t. It just means that my blog should be a touch easier to find in Google now that the link structure isn’t a variable name anymore.

Questions? Having issues yourself on how to setup your own permalinking structure? Leave a comment and I will help you out as best I can. If I can do it, so can anyone else.

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Rotheblog 2.0 (WordPress) Launched!

After over two long months of work, I am putting out my informal “Beta” launch of the revised Rotheblog.com.

I assume that there will be some bugs, and I hope that all of you will tell me about them. Email me at rothecreations at gmail dot com if you find something that doesn’t work, or just visit my contact page to get a hold of me that way.

If something is hard for you to find, drop me a line. I want this to be as easy as possible to navigate with all of the ranges of different content I now have going on here.

I do hope some of you will make comments. I know I had this feature temporarily available before in the Movies section, but that was very specific. Now, you can make a comment anywhere just about, so I really look forward to seeing some of that.

Hope you like it, it was a hard decision when I started, and it was a lot of hard work, but I think it will be well worth it in the end.

~Jeff

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My WordPress Seminar at St. John

Today was the day for the seminar that I had planning at St. John Lutheran for over a month. This was the last step to educate the new group of people running the website so I can officially step away from day to day maintenance. I was still debating on whether I should get up in front of church after the service ended to remind the congregation about my class, but the service took so long that it ran into the time that I was going to use as setup. So, I didn’t announce anything.

Ron helped me get things situated as best as possible. I had not one content editor for the church website show up, which was rather disappointing but I had a great little crowd show up that I hadn’t planned on. (even thought I knew of a couple that had already said why they couldn’t be there. I also came home to a message from John on my cell, glad to at least hear from him)

The class went well I thought. I was talking to a group of people that wanted to learn more about web design in general and I was talking about web topics related to the WordPress church website, so I just hope that they got something out of it. We went over a bunch of different stuff, including some HTML tags, so that at least should have been helpful.

The class lasted until 1:30, a little shorter than I had planned, which was great. At the last minute this morning Sarah grabbed snacky food to set out for the class, which made it feel that much more planned out. She is a great compliment to the weaknesses that I have in planning. No one really ate much, but better to have it and not need it then not have it at all.

When we got back, I had freelance stuff to finish up for a couple of hours. I also did a number of other things, played a couple games of Jr. Pac-man, worked on some of the final touches on this blog launch, and got out into the garage to try some things out on the games and take some photos to get some more questions answered.

The rest of the night was the regular Sunday routine. Sarah talked with her parents, I was on the phone with Justin for awhile. By the time we were done with that, Sarah headed to bed, and I watched a couple of Scrubs episodes before hitting the sack.

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