Tag: wordpress

WordPress Upgrade Headaches

WordPress prompted me to update to the latest version, and of course I figured nothing would go wrong. The update ran well enough, but I was totally unable to access the back-end of the website afterward. The process was running out of memory. I discovered that my host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net limit the amount of memory for each PHP process to 32MB unless you pay an extra fee. It's not much to get it bumped up to 64MB, only a few cents a day, but I always prefer the cheaper option. I was able to regain access to the admin panel by renaming the folder /wp-content/plugins to /wp-content/plugins.old, which prevented them from being loaded.

In the mean time I also went ahead and installed W3 Total Cache and, in doing so, ran headlong into another problem. It seems the 'tmp' folder created by the installation script does not belong to the same user as my FTP account, so even with permissions set to crazy (777) I was unable to save any settings. I had enough privileges to rename it and create a new 'tmp' folder, which ironed out the problem. Hopefully the site is running a little faster for everyone as a result.

What do you put on a blog anyways?

It's been a while since I've put time into maintaining a website, and now that I've got all my hosting and DNS managed through nearlyfreespeech.net I feel I can start paying attention again. This is despite the fact that I should be pouring more time into research; I can rationalize that having a place to actively write can only help me when it comes time to pen papers and the like. In the previous incarnation of my site, I used it as an area for playing around with CSS and tossing up write-ups (generated in the same spirit of keeping myself relatively sharp on the material) on various semi-technical topics. In addition when I hit problematic spots with Ubuntu on my old Dell Mini 9 I usually wrote up the solutions when I'd pieced them together, hopefully saving others the hassle. For the curious, that mini is currently employed as the interface of an all-optical switch deep in the CIAN testbed, still trucking on years later.

I've put together a poll on the sidebar to see what people would like to see show up here. If there is an option missing, feel free to drop it in the comments. I don't anticipate an enormous number of responses, so any feedback is appreciated.