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Category Archives: Website Administration
Where’s All The Blogging News?
As Blogging gets more popular it’s becoming more and more difficult to figure out where to go to find good news on blogging itself. I wanted to point you all to a place that I’ve found that has a ton of great information for anyone interested in learning what works and doesn’t work for blogging, or for any type of website. Daily Blog Tips is exactly that, a daily updated site that has great articles about pretty much anything you can imagine in regard to making a successful website. I’m looking at tons of articles there to get ideas about the future of this site. Go, check it out, you never know what you might find there that can be beneficial.
Memory Outage Errors in WordPress
Many people on the WordPress.org forums have experienced an issue where they see errors on their site that say something like “memory exhausted” when they try to use a video or image plugin on their site (however, it can occur for other reasons also). In most cases this is not a coding issue with the actual plugin they are trying to use, it is an issue with their server.
Typically this error shows up on sites that are hosted as part of a shared server. In PHP there is a setting that allows the server admin to set exactly how much memory PHP can utilize for any one process. This is designed to make it difficult for one site on a shared server to overwhelm the entire server’s resources, and therefore make all of the other sites inaccessible. When it comes to image or video processing though, memory is very necessary to allow resizing or other effects to properly allow the presentation of the file. In cases where this memory issue continually occurs you will need to contact your server admin and request that they boost your memory limit enough to prevent the error from occurring. It may also be time to think about moving to your own server (especially if you are getting very popular).
If you get these memory errors using AWSOM Pixgallery, you do have some other options. In some cases reducing the number of images per gallery page may help out the situation–Do this by making the Rows and Columns setting for Thumbnails (in the Pixgallery options area) smaller so as to extend your Gallery onto multiple pages when showing your gallery. Another option is to reduce in file size the size of the images you are using in your gallery. You may not have noticed that your images were large in filesize, and lowering their size (not necessarily resolution, but re-encoding maybe at a lower .jpg quality setting) may help reduce your overall PHP memory usage (and lower your bandwidth transmission also). In many cases the memory error will only occur the first time a gallery is viewed (the first viewing of a gallery initiates the auto-thumbnail creation). If all else fails, you can contact me and I might be able to give you a few more advanced tips specific to your situation.
In any case, now you know why this mysterious error occurs and how you can work to resolve it.
Webcomic Sites Using WordPress: DeadofSummer.org
As part of my series of mentioning sites that use WordPress to host their comics I would like to present DeadofSummer.org. These guys are using WordPress with the ComicPress (classic 1.6 version, I think update: Marty chimed in to let me know they are using 2.0) theme. As such they are a perfect candidate for using AWSOM Pixgallery as their image archive of their comics (hint, hint) since it has automatic support for linking back to the news post for the image being viewed in the archive.
I think it’s always important to see what others are doing with their sites as you develop your own, so go check them out.
Firefox, WordPress, One Click, Done!
Here at AWSOM.org I try to keep things as simple as possible in terms of how I set up my plugins and tutorials for WordPress. I have to be honest though, someone has beat me in the simple department. A new plugin for Firefox/Wordpress has made it exceptionally simple to upload a new plugin or theme to your WordPress install. OneClick is a plugin that literally makes it as simple as clicking a link to add a new theme or plugin to your install. It seems to work like a dedicated ftp program that you set once to your install and then it just works. It even has it’s own plugin/theme backup system! If you want absolutely simple this is about good as it gets.
Security Scanner Plugin for WordPress
While it’s still pretty early in it’s development, Blogsecurity.net has created a new security plugin for WordPress. This plugin works with their site to do a scan of your WordPress install to determine if there are any generic security issues present on your site. Right now it’s pretty basic, but it can quickly tell you a few common issues that might exist and direct you to how to fix them. The main page to get the plugin and read up on how it works is http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/tools/wp-scanner/. Remember though, once you use the scanner, go back and disable the plugin you installed on your site from your WordPress Plugins admin page, you don’t want to leave it active.