Recently I’ve been tasked with management of a couple of WordPress websites that get more traffic than I’m used to dealing with. Quite a bit more in fact. So much so that they were causing the server they lived on to have memory issues, random reboots and other odd issues.
In order to get the sites more stable, I started clearing out plug-ins. Starting by deleting the ones that were being used and actually deleting them off the server. Then removing plugins that weren’t really needed and replacing them with a WordPress function where possible.
Result: Not enough to stablize the server
Looking at the logs, I found quite a bit of traffic to the WordPress comment system. These sites are running Disqus, so WordPress comments aren’t needed. Got rid of them. I also noticed quite a bit of traffic and strain on the servers coming from other sites, hotlinking to images, javascript files and content. Turned on hot-link protection for all but a few sites and blocked a few IPs.
Result: Better, but server still not 100% stable. (Read on…)
For those of you that might have visited donburnside.com yesterday, you might have noticed a little something different. Different in as much as a redirect to some website that wasn’t english. Nothing bad as far as I could tell, just not here.
Turns out, this was completely avoidable and has been corrected. You see, I never bothered to stop using the default ‘admin’ user. My password was brute forced and the main index.php file was over written, and my themes index.php file was blanked out. Good thing I had backups.
So, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t use WordPress with the admin username. While I’m a little late to this party, better late than never.
Earlier I posted this about a really cool idea that I have. I’ve written it up to the first revision, had a rough mock done and was ready to move forward.
Until I found out that Apple recently patented my idea. Well, not exactly, but pretty dang close. Close enough for me to put the brakes on it and go about it in a different way.
This one came to me during my 8 hour long drive from Las Vegas after the last AMVIV. I missed a few things during the event that were changed, and so did a few other people. This got me to thinking. Wouldn’t it be cool to follow an event?
Twitter would be pretty keen, but what if you aren’t following the right people? Or, what if you are following the right people but the noise gets in the way and you miss important information about the event/conference that you are attending? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a twitter-like experience at the next conference or meeting or [insert large event here]? Full push updates to your smart phone, updates as they happen and reminders about schedules?
Yea.
Not to worry. instead of trying to find the funds and people necessary to completely build this out from scratch (which might still happen), I am instead going to start doing this with WordPress, a handful of plugins and twitter.
If you are looking for a way to keep your event goers up-to-date on the latest news and information about your event, let me know. I’m going to be putting something like this for the upcoming MTTS as a test, but would be interested in setting it up for one other event for a smokin’ good price.
You might remember my Facebook Connect how-to that I posted back in January. I got a request about how to modify the widget in the shape of a comment, but I deleted by mistake. I did reply via email and thought I would add it here for wiki purposes.
From Archchef at casualgaminformer.com comes this question.
Is there a way to disable the “Last visitors” section in the widget? I don’t exactly want nor need it but can’t find any way of killing the darn thing
This one is very easy. To remove the part of the widget you don’t want to see, open fbconnect_widget.php and scroll down to line 31, or there about. There are 2 lines below that, remove them, save and upload. You should be good to go. If you want the code, leave a comment below and I’ll hook you up.
I know the plugin still isn’t 100% here. I hope to have that fixed before I go to Vegas this coming weekend.
When I originally built the theme for this site, I didn’t think about making it work for anyone but me. I know, quite selfish of me, right?
Then, as dev continued, I got the idea that I really should try to make it more of a standard WP theme, make sure it works in all browsers, make sure it looks good in all browsers and works with just about any plugin I throw at it. All of that is the reason why this theme took me over 3 months of tweaking to develop.
And, for the first time ever, it has been replicated. You can see the screen shot above, or view it live here. That’s right, it’s the My Cruise Planner site that Michael and his lovely wife work on, post news articles to and host their Mail Buoy podcast from.
Of course I had way too much of the hand coded stuff in it for them to use, primarily in the sidebar. If I were to distribute this as a stand-alone-anyone-can-use-it theme, I would leave that almost blank anyway and let whoever took it use it for whatever they wanted, much like I have done for the MCP site.
I did have to make a few others changes as well. Primarily in the categories, and this is my best wordpress trick and I’m using it everywhere I need this functionality.
Doing this allows separation of the parent categories within the structure of the site while at the same time not excluding anything from the RSS feed. I’m sure many of you have already noticed that the podcasts are showing up in your feeds, yet you do not see them on the ‘blog’ section here.
Just thought I’d toot my own before I changed the portfolio page.
If you do need any kind of travel, you really should talk to them first. No foolin’, they have saved my butt more than a few times. It’s also why they are the official travel planners of White Roof Radio.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.