Webmaster Crap
Moving Your Feedburner Feeds to Google
Feedburner was bought by Google some time ago, yet nothing changed. Well, they’re forcing the issue now and they are now officially requiring all Feedburner users to migrate their feeds over to Google. The good thing is that they’ve made the process pretty automatic and painless. The bad thing (and I have yet to see it, but am bracing for it) is that it might make my RSS stats drop off the face of the earth. We shall see. Click Here To Continue Reading »
How To Use a Custom Page Template In Wordpress
Sometimes, it is useful to give a particular section or page of your blog a completely different look and feel from your regular blog theme. It is very easy to do in Wordpress.
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How To Replace Your Wordpress Search With Google
Google is the undisputed king of search. They do it well. What many bloggers may not be aware of is that you can use Google as your site’s main search engine. You don’t have to use your blog engine’s built in search.
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Digg, The Server Killer And How To Rescue Wordpress From It
I love Wordpress and I’ll continue to recommend it to anybody over another blog platform. On top of a great product, you also have a HUGE library of available plug-ins available which allow you to extend Wordpress into almost any situation. That said, that same extensibility also beefs up the code-base of Wordpress. This leads to server load.
I have talked about high server load with Wordpress before. I got the problem under control at the time, but it had gotten progressively worse over time. PCMECH had been dealing with some serious server load issues. With enough incoming traffic, the server would literally use up all it’s swap file space. When that happens, Apache literally just gives up and restarts. While that happens, the site is inaccessible.
Last week, to compound this problem, one of our stories on PCMECH made it onto the homepage of Digg. As expected, we got a HUGE influx of traffic.
The server could not keep up. Apache was dying and restarting every couple minutes – literally. For this reason, the incoming traffic logs did show an increase in traffic, but clearly not the huge effect we would usually see from the Digg homepage. All this because it was literally KILLING the server.
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Wordpress Borks My Server? Dealing with High Server Load
I have been dealing with server issues over at PCMech for a little while now. Yesterday, I think we finally made some headway. We ended up replacing the APC PHP opcode cache with eAcellerator as well as upgraded the motherboard and processor.
Wordpress is a fantastic product, but when you add some plug-ins to it it can become a huge beast which uses a lot of server resources. Especially when your blog is hit by a lot of traffic.
A few tips on optimizing server load on a heavily trafficked Wordpress blog:
- Use a PHP opcode cache. I know it’s technical, but basically an opcode cache stores compiled PHP code in a cache so that it does not have to be re-compiled every time it is run. PHP, by nature, is compiled in real-time otherwise. Using an opcode cache can significantly speed up your site.
- Apache calls are, by nature, memory intensive. And it gets worse the more dynamic your site is (and Wordpress is pretty dynamic). One way to offload some load is to offload your images and movie files to another server.
- Separate the database server from the main server. At PCMech, we have a server just for MySQL and another for the main site files.
- Deactivate any plug-ins you’re not using. You might not save the day doing this, but it does help reduce load.
- Use a Wordpress cache plug-in like WP Super Cache. This can, too, work quite well. The only thing you have to be careful with is anything which is dynamic on a per-user basis. In my case with PCMech, I cannot run a blanket cache like this because I have premium members who see things differently than everybody else.
Luckily, most blogs won’t have to deal with this. Wordpress can accommodate quite a bit of traffic all by itself. It is usually the high traffic blogs that have to worry about such things.
Aweber and Apple MobileMe Emails Being Banned
Just a quick note. I just notified Aweber that they are currently blocking me.com email addresses from being registered as a subscriber on any Aweber mailing list. Me.com is, of course, the new MobileMe service from Apple.
For a long time, it used to be that people who signed up to a mailing list using @me.com addresses were known to be bogus. I doubt Aweber is the only company out there that bans the domain. Now that Apple is actually making legitimate use of the domain, that changes things and now it is increasingly likely that we’ll see @me.com emails sign up for an email list.
Aweber will shortly remove the ban. If anybody else is also blocking the domain, it should be lifted as well.
My Blog Was Hacked (I Think) – The Story
Part of having a website online – especially a popular one – is that, well, shit happens. And it can become a target for hackers. I am not sure if what happened to PCMECH was a result of intentional hacking or something else. Nonetheless, PCMECH was down for close to 16 hours.
The only reason it was down so long is because I was away from the office and in an area in Central Florida where I had no cell phone coverage. I can get online here, however I didn’t check my email until this morning at around 8 AM. It looks like PCMECH died around 4:30 PM yesterday.
Oh, and yes, waking up to find out first thing that the entire world is beating down your door because your website is offline isn’t much fun. If that doesn’t wake you up, nothing will. 
I had emails. I have tweets. I had it all. Everybody was asking what was happening, yet there I was up in Central Florida enjoying myself with no idea what was happening.
My perfect Saturday morning. Using the MacBook to restore PCMECH.
Showing my Dad what I’m doing. Why I’m smiling? I have no idea.
Still not exactly sure what transpired, but I’ll get to the bottom of it. For one reason or the other, the main site database got corrupted. Wordpress, because it could not detect the data properly, was defaulting to the installation script (which was still on the server). The public was then seeing the Wordpress installation script rather than the regular website. And, yes, people WERE running the install script on the database which was, of course, making a huge mess. So, I immediately started a database restore and had my web host delve into the server logs. My host (Pair Networks) did a fantastic job at springing to action early on a Saturday morning. Took a couple hours of back-and-forth, but we got PCMECH back online with with minimal data loss. Had to do a database restore and a bunch of repairing of tables.
What I’m about to impart is so obvious here that I slap myself for not doing it earlier. Install a self-hosted Wordpress? Don’t be a jackass. Delete the install.php and the upgrade.php files. Despite whatever may have set off this chain of events, the damage would have been less severe had those files not been public and web accessible.
Yeah, even people who’ve been doing this for awhile make dumbass mistakes some times.
How To: Putting the Full Blog Post Into An Aweber Blog Broadcast
OK, time for a quick, technical post. I post these as much for myself for later reference as I do readers.
PROBLEM: Aweber has a blog broadcast tool which does a great job of sending your blog posts out via email. Problem is that it takes the content of that post from the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS feed. This means that, out of the box (so to speak) you cannot send anything but excerpts of your blog posts via email.
Personally, I find this to be a rather asinine limitation on Aweber’s part, but oh well.
You have two options:
- Copy/paste your entire blog post into the excerpt field manually every time you make a post.
- Hack the RSS feed so that the full post goes into the DESCRIPTION field in the feed.
I chose the latter, and this hack is for Wordpress.
In the feed-rss2.php file, located in the wp-includes folder, find the following code:
<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
Basically, whether you choose full or partial feed in Wordpress options, you’re going to get the excerpt field in that description field. Change the above code to this:
<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<?php /* This hack put in to put full posts into description field for Aweber */ ?>
<?php /*<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>*/ ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?>]]></description>
This will put your content into the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS2 feed.
And like magic, Aweber will pick up the full body of your post and send it out to your list.
Spammers = Assholes
For the last several days, I have been getting bounce emails containing gibberish. This morning, I get this in my email:
That’s right. Some asshole is out there mailing penis spam with MY email as the return address. I wouldn’t be surprised if MY email is being added to blacklists.
Chances are, one of my PCMech readers or somebody I have dealt with by email (which is a boatload of people) has a computer virus. That virus has started spamming their address book. I don’t see much spam because I’m using Gmail (fantastic filtering), but my email address is pretty well-known given what I do for a living. I guess this is par for the course.
Still sucks, though.
Anti-virus people! Use it. Love it.
Alexa Overhauls Stats: You Seeing Changes?
Alexa has long been used as a source for data on traffic for websites. Problem is, it has also long been known for being wildly inaccurate. It is a decent indicator of trends, but not actual traffic. Well, Alexa has announced it is changing the way it counts traffic, according to a story on Techcrunch.
From the announcement:
In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!
We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.
The announcement is, of course, spin. The system was flawed in it’s prior form, with total reliance on the Alexa toolbar. Fail.
Amit is tracking how this change has affected some of the leading bloggers.
For my part, I checked out Alexa’s rating for PCMech. It seems to have helped my ranking, actually. I seem to recall, last time I checked, the ranking was a little over 40,000. Now it is sitting at 28,945. Rock on.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
