Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Anyone else having trouble with WordPress 2.8?

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For the first time ever, I updated to the newest version of WordPress on the day that it came out. I believe that was June 11th. I spent that day upgrading all my blogs – all 17 of them!

Most of the installations went well, but I’m having trouble with my blogs on Feverishthoughts.com. The visual editor doesn’t work. Normally this wouldn’t bother me all that much since I do most of my writing in the plain text HTML mode, but if you want to add a picture via the “add an image” tab it doesn’t work. I click on the tab and nothing happens.

Same goes for adding post tags. I have to add tags for my posts by saving the post as a draft, then going to the Post section and doing a quick edit to add the tags.

I tend to upload most of my pictures to my Flickr account and then use the Flickr code to add them to my posts, however without being able to use “visual mode” I can’t re-size my images if they need an adjustment.

The two blogs that suffer the most from my lack of ability to use visual mode and add pictures are my photo blog (naturally!) and my gardening blog. I have tons of new photos of the flowers that are blooming in my garden and I can’t post them! How frustrating!

It sounds like the current beta version of WordPress 2.8.1 will address these issues, but given my experience I think I’ll hold off downloading the beta version for now.

Oh and it’s not a plugin conflict. Even with all my plugins deactivated I still can’t use the visual editor. I’ve also cleared my browser cache and tried re-installing wordpress (automatically) and that didn’t help either.

I think I’ll try manually upgrading one of my blogs and see if that helps. Maybe some of the files were corrupted when I used the automatic upgrade.

Anyone else having similar problems with WordPress?

Next time I’ll wait a couple of weeks before upgrading after a new version comes out.





Anyone having problems with Hostgator lately?

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I’m having hosting problems again. If you’re a regular visitor to this site you’ve probably noticed that at times my blog (and all the other blogs I write) load really slow and sometimes you’ll see error messages scattered throughout the page as well.

I’ve also had problems with my Wp-posts databases crashing and needing repair too. Plus I often can’t edit old posts and get error messages when I try. Nor can I always post when I want to because of server slowness or errors. I’m just about at my wits end.

This started happening near the end of March. I think the reason my sites are having trouble is because HostGator upgraded their MySql to PHP 5.1 and it’s causing all the errors and slow load times.

Anyone else on HostGator experiencing problems in the last month or so? I’m sure there’s a few, as I’ve noticed some of the blogs I visit regularly loading really really slowly lately when they didn’t have problems in the past.

If they don’t fix the problem soon ie go back to a trouble free version of PHP I may be forced to look for a new host. I hate that idea! I’ve loved Hostgator since I started with them in 2007 after a terrible experience with Lunarpages.

Any suggestions? I have over 20 websites and blogs now with more on the way so I need a very good shared hosting package from a company that doesn’t overcrowded/oversell their servers or else move up to VPS hosting.

Speaking of Lunarpages … I finally transferred some of my old domains from their service in April. I didn’t have a hosting account with them any longer, but when I left I let them continue to handle my domains registration … bad move as this meant I had to deal with support several times each year begging them to renew my domains. Believe me, their support people need support and sales training in a big way! Anyway … my domains are now with GoDaddy … but get this … Lunarpages sent me a renewal notice today for one of my domains that they no longer control! So I’m still stuck dealing with their support trying to tell them that I really don’t have anything to do with them anymore! Arghhhh! Frustrating! They’d better not try to bill me!

So again, if you have any good hosting suggestions I’d love to hear about it, plus if you have any hosting horror stories feel free to pass that on too. LOL

WP_Posts database crashed – HELP!

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I need some help fixing my husbands blog – Guitar Licks. Today when he visited the site (while I was still sleeping) the blog had error messages stating that the WP_posts database had crashed.

When you visit his site it loads with the WP theme and sidebars, but there’s error messages at the top and a “post cannot be found” message where current posts should be listed on the index page.

Some of the errors state:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_title` ( `post_title`)

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_content` ( `post_content`)

So I’m assuming this error has something to do with the Yet another related post plugin that I’m using on most of my blogs. This blog is using the plugin version 2.16 and is using WP 2.62.

In the Yet another related posts plugin admin area there was a message that said:

YARPP’s “consider titles” and “consider bodies” relatedness criteria require your wp_posts table to use the MyISAM storage engine, but the table seems to be using the engine. These two options have been disabled.
To restore these features, please update your wp_posts table by executing the following SQL directive: ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ENGINE = MyISAM; . No data will be erased by altering the table’s engine, although there are performance implications.
If, despite this check, you are sure that wp_posts is using the MyISAM engine, press this magic button:

I clicked on the “magic button” as the plugin seems to be working just fine in all of my other blogs and I ended up with even more errors!

Help!

I’ve looked at the WP database for this blog and the WP_posts table says “in use” and I can’t browse it. I also can’t use the backup plugin in Guitar licks – it’s there and functioning but just hung when I tried to do a back up.

I’ve backed up the whole database using PHPmyAdmin so I have a copy in case something goes terribley wrong. Now I just need to know how to fix it.

Should I just place a check mark on WP_posts and then click the repair function at the bottom of the structure screen in PHPmyAdmin and see if that repairs the problem?

I’m nervous about attempting to fix this as I’ve never had to try to repair a database error before. Any help would be appreciated.

Some posts draw more spam than others

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Last week I wrote a post about how Chris and I have been trying to eat healthier in the past month. Not that we usually don’t eat good low fat foods or anything, but we really stepped it up in light of Chris’ high Cholesterol.

Well let me tell you … that post has received more spam comments in the past week than any other post I’ve written in the last month!

The comment spammers are all from sites that talk about weight loss, health foods and diet pills. Oh and a few of the spammers seem to be fixated on hamburger for some reason, even though I never mentioned hamburger let alone hamburgers in the original post. Weird.

Do you ever write posts that seem to bring all the comment spammers out of the woodwork? What topics draw the most spammers?

Migrating to Google Feeds

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It looks like my RSS feeds, the ones that I set up on Feedburner, will be migrating over to Google Feeds sometime tomorrow.

I got an email from Google last week stating that my feeds would migrate to Google Feeds on the 5th. I didn’t request the migration, but I guess that they must be converting all of their Feedburner customers over to Google now.

Now that the day has just about arrived I’m starting to get nervous.

Will my Feedburner Feedsmith WP plugin still work? I use the plugin to convert my normal WordPress post and comment feeds to a Feedburner feed so I can accurate track my subscribers. Will I still be able to do that?

I took a look at the Google Forums and did a search for “Feedburner plugin” and a few other similar keywords, but I really couldn’t find much information as to whether it will still work once my feeds are on Google. A Google search turned up similarly unsatisfying results so I’m going to assume that the Feedburner plugin has continued to work for most people.

If you’ve converted your feeds from Feedburner to Google feeds and you use or used the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin would you be so kind as to let me know if it still works for you?

I have 30 Feedburner Feeds so I hope the migration goes well!

If everything goes well I’ll be able to monetize my feeds with Adsense. I’m not sure whether I’ll do that or not. I know that some of the big bloggers who are using Adsense for Feeds have stated that they are making money on their feeds, but I also know that people read RSS feeds not only for the convenience of being able to read their favorite feeds in one place, but also because the feeds are often ad free.

Have you added Adsense to your feeds? Are you making any money? How did your readers respond?

Now here’s a question for my RSS readers – how would you feel if I added an Adsense banner or two to my feeds? Would it bother you or would you be fine with it?

If I do decide to try Adsense for feeds I’d put the ad below the post. I HATE visiting a website and seeing big ads above a post. I mean, we visit websites or read feeds for the content and it’s just irritating to have to scroll down past an ad before you can read the content you came for, isn’t it?

BTW if you mainly read my sites by RSS feed or via an email subscription, if you suddenly stop being able to get my feed or if it looks like there’s no new posts (I generally post at least once a day) please let me know as there might be a problem with the feed thanks to the feed migration from Feedburner to Google Feeds.

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