Tag Archives: Wordpress

LinuxCon 2010 Just for Fun Poll Results explained

Posted by on August 12, 2010 No comments

The results of the “Just for Fun” Poll  linux.com community have just been released.  You may be wondering what some of those weird names actually mean, so here goes a short guide for those, like myself, who are not up to date with it all.


Best new Kernel Feature

  1. Btrfs: is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone.

    Linux has a wealth of filesystems to choose from, but we are facing a number of challenges with scaling to the large storage subsystems that are becoming common in today’s data centers. Filesystems need to scale in their ability to address and manage large storage, and also in their ability to detect, repair and tolerate errors in the data stored on disk. [extracted from https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page ]

  2. Dynamic Tracing: Dynamic event tracing is one of the newest feature on perf/ftrace. This allows users to dynamically add/remove additional trace-events with various arguments in the kernel. This feature consists of kprobe-based event tracer and ‘perf-probe’ user-space command which helps users to find probe points easily from source code by analyzing kernel debuginfo.  Extracted from http://events.linuxfoundation.org/lfcs2010/tracing
  3. LogFS: is a Linux log-structured and scalable flash filesystem, intended for use on large devices of flash memory. It is written by Jörn Engel and in part sponsored by the CE Linux Forum. [extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogFS ]
  4. Ceph Filesystem: Ceph is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. [ extracted from http://ceph.newdream.net/about/ ]


Read more »

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WordPress Media upload HTTP Error

Posted by on August 26, 2009 3 comments

WordPress and WordPress-MU have given me the HTTP error in the various installations I have performed and each time there’s a different cause. This post is nothing more than a personal notation for future reference but I hope it’s helpful to someone.

Error: when trying to upload media using the WordPress Flash uploader it get the message HTTP Error

Disclaimer: before messing with your .htaccess file, make sure you have a backup copy of it in case it causes a 500 Server configuration error. If this happens just replace the .htaccess file with the back up version. Check your code for any mistakes and try again.

Possible causes:

  • mod_security – basically all Apache servers will have it turned on, so you may need to turn it off for the async-upload.php file using .htaccess. The newer versions of WP have added this code already, but in case you mess up your htaccess file, here it is.  Just add the following lines to the bottom of your .htaccess file in the root folder of your WP or WP-MU installation. 
<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

  • Access Denied Error 403/ Permission issue – another typical problem. Make sure that the upload folder is writeable by the server, you can set the permission to 754 and it should work fine. In WordPress the upload folder sits under /wp-content/  in WP-MU it sits under /blogs.dir/”blog number”/files  (default site blog number is 1 and the other blogs are numbered in ascending order of creation)
  • PHP Upload limit – check you PHP.ini settings for the settings upload_max_filesize and post_max_size. You can change these directly in your PHP.ini if you have access to it or you can change it by adding a php.ini file to you root directory with the following code. The default is normally 2M but you can change it to anything at your own risk, you should not need more then 8M.)
post_max_size = 8M
upload_max_filesize = 8M

or by adding the following lines to your .htaccess file:
php_value upload_max_filesize 8M
php_value post_max_size 8M

for anything above 8M you may need to add an execution time to the .htaccess code also
php_value max_execution_time 800

  • Authentication Failed Error 401- I checked my server log and noticed that WordPress was trying to access the 401.shtml error template every time I got the HTTP error during a media upload attempt. This normally occours if you are using password protection for the WordPress root folder or the folder where your uploads should reside. You should disable the password protection on the folder i norder for the uploader to work.

Hope it helps. Please leave your contributions and bug reports so others can benefit from it.

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Keyword search and website ranking tools

Posted by on June 5, 2009 No comments

Any webmaster and marketer will know how important it is to keep track of their website ranking, keyword positioning, visits, ROI and so on…  There are a lot of interesting tools out there to help us. 

  • Google Analytics – Visitor tracking, keyword positioning, goal setting, demographics and more…
  • http://www.alexa.com – web traffic metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more… 
  • Google Webmaster Tools – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google
  • Yahoo Site Explorer – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Yahoo
  • Bling Webmaster Center – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Bling (former LiveSearch)
  • Keyword Spy – Research and track keywords in 3 search engines and 30+ countries.
  • KPMRS – website rank monitoring services on various search engines
    for multiple keywords.
  • XML-Sitemaps – Generate sitemaps online. Up to 500 urls Free.
  • WP Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

These are just a few tools I use the most, please share yours.

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Offline Blogging Tools

Posted by on May 12, 2009 No comments

Keyboard

Offline Blogging Tools let you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog.  I personally like the easy to use Scribefire, a Firefox addon, but there are many others our there.  Here is a shortlist…

Scribefire

Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux

This is an addon for Firefox so you need to be using Firefox (clearly)

BlogDesk

Platform: Windows

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

BlogGTK

Platform: Linux

BloGTK is a weblog client that allows you to post to your weblog from GNOME without the need for a separate browser window. BloGTK allows you to connect with many weblog systems such as Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and more.

Windows Live Writer (by Microsoft)

Platform: Windows

WLW is a desktop application for publishing to blogs and works with almost any blog provider in the world including Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress and more.

Qumana

Platform: Mac, Windows

Great for bloggers on the move. Qumana features include easy text formatting and image insertion, simple Technorati tagging, advertising insertion with Q Ads and more.

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SEO and WordPress

Posted by on December 13, 2008 1 comment

Optimise your WordPress blog or site for search with a couple of plugins and the web tools provided by Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch. The All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress will let you manipulate the specific SEO content of your blog like page title, meta data and description. Defaults can be set in the admin area of the plugin on your dashboard and specific settings can be tweaked as you create or edit a post.

The other important plugin is the Google XML Sitemap Generator, which creates a nice sitemap for you. After installing this plugin you need to create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files in the root folder of your blog and change their permissions CHMOD  666. The easiest is to right-click on the files in your FTP client and change permissions under properties, 666 stands for Read and Write permission for Owner / Group / Others.  For more information see the README.txt included with the plugin.  Read more »

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