Step 1

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

Step 2

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.

Step 3

Looking at the remaining plugins and with help from support, the next culprit was the NextGen Gallery plugin. This is a key component on each site and disabling it actually was a bad thing. But I had a server that was rebooting itself every day, so disabling it I had to do.

Support was also able to temporarily upgrade the server (it’s a virtual server, so easy for them to do).

Result: Stable server!

Step 4 Needing to allowing more hotlinking than I had setup, NextGen gallery support and to improve the overall speed of the sites, it was time to look for solutions. It was recommended to look at using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Rackspace or Amazon S3. Having not used a CDN before, I figured it was as good a time as any to give it a whirl, and I decided (based primarily on price) to use Amazon S3.

Starting here at donburnside.com.

The google pointed me at a few plugins that have been crucial in making the switch to S3 possible.

• Creating a CNAME DNS entry for the S3 bucket.
• WP Super Cache. Some recommended W3 Total Cache, but I read it gave memory errors on occassion (a problem I was trying to escape) and Super Cache was already installed on both sites
• Amazon S3 for WordPress. What this does is take anything that is uploaded using the WordPress media uploader and automatically moves it into the S3 bucket of my choosing.
• CDN Sync Tool. While it acts weird on my server because a depreciated piece of PHP is missing, I was still able to make it work to get all of the data needed over to the Amazon S3 bucket and keep them updated, kind of.

Starting with the CNAME entry, I mapped it to an identically named S3 bucket. This is needed to make sure everything works correctly. The CNAME entry is required for the Amazon S3 plugin to work correctly.

Once that was setup, I used CDN Sync to get all of the necessary files to the bucket. It’s also used to keep certain directories updated, like the gallery directory. That part happens manually which I will discuss later.

Finally, turning on CDN support in Total Cache. This redirects any call to any folder specified (wp-content and wp-includes are default) to the CNAME’d entry that I previously specified.

Done and done. WordPress, within a few hours, running from a CDN. Since I’ve not done this before, it took much longer than a few hours. Now that I know how easy it is, it won’t next time.

NextGen Gallery + Amazon S3

Currently, there is no support for any CDN within the NextGen Gallery Plugin. This is a problem because, like I mentioned, the sites rely heavily on that plugin. Some more googling brings me to this thread at the WordPress.org support forums offering a hack to redirect the plugin to look at the S3 bucket I needed. And it works very well with 1 minor hitch. Hacking a plugin to work outside of it’s normal parameters means with the next update, your hack will be gone. So I created a duplicate of the file that I modified so I can replace it (or duplicate the hack) after an update.

Once that is done, when you upload images to the gallery they go into the gallery folder on the server just like always, but you can’t see any of the images or thumbnails since they are being referenced back to the CDN. That means that once a gallery is created and images are uploaded, you have to go back into CDN Sync Tool and run a sync on the wp-content/gallery/[directory name here]. That will move all of the images and thumbnails to the CDN and you can post the gallery, serving images from the CDN.

Now I have sites that are not only running faster than before, but they are using half as much bandwidth from the hosting company and fewer resources (all js and css files are also being served from the CDN). And, at least on Amazon, for not very much cost. On 2 sites that get approximately 175K views per month, the cost is going to be about $30 or less, and the bandwidth savings on the server is close to 75%!

If you are looking for a way to speed up a site or reduce the load on a server, I can not recommend this enough.

Comments are open if you have any questions!

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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.

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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.

The Idea

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.

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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.

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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.

• Create a main, or parent, category
• Create sub, or child, categories under the parent
• Set category base to ‘section’ (it could be anything really)

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.

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I spent a good part of the day setting up the Facebook Connect plugin over at Motoringfile. I also set it up here, but haven’t spent nearly as long tweaking it. That means it’s personal wiki time! Weeeeeee

This plug-in does require a few things to work correctly.

You need to add this to the html line in header.php.

Also in the header you should have

In the footer, you need

Your theme should be widgetized. There is a code chunk at the plugin site if it’s not. I’ll be writing this up soon as well.

Once you do everything you need to do to get the plugin installed and configured so it works in your theme, then it’s time to make it look good in your theme as well.

The easiest way to do this is to copy the style from index.php. This includes the call to header.php and any styles that happen before the loop. You will also want to grab the call to footer.php. Paste all of that into the top and bottom of the following files.

• myhome.php

• community.php

• userprofile.php

• invitefriends.php

Once that is done, it should fit nicely into your theme. Don’t look at this one, yet. Go over and check it out at Motoringfile.com instead.

Finally, if you want to remove the check from the box in the comments, you will need to edit fbConnectInterface.php. Find the following line on or around line 47.

And remove the part that says

checked="checked"

I am available for questions or to assist you should you need it.

No related posts.

Starting with the editing of the hosts file. It should be. Just. This. Simple.

Right? Yea, that doesn’t work for me since vi makes no sense to me at all and I couldn’t figure out how to open it in such a way that I could actually make changes.

For those of you in the audience that are neck beard and ponytail challenged, here is what you do.

• From the Finder menu, click Go –> Go to Folder
• Type in /etc
• Find your Hosts file. Double click to open it. I recommend editing it with Smultron since it will allow you to authenticate to save.

That’s how you do that.

Now, to install WordPress MU on MAMP. I have spent more than an hour trying to find the solution. All I manage to find are crappy responses on message boards, but not a single link to my solution. It requires editing the httpconf file in MAMP and the hosts file I do know that.

So far it’s installed and I can get a 404 page. Once I make it work, I will be posting it here as well.

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The front page is 100% automated pulling posts from a single category twice, all of the posts once plus the feed from a message board. Almost exactly like the homepage here. A new addition to the layout that I have not used before is a jQuery slider. After some tweaking it’s actually very very cool. To get an idea, it works like this. I will be getting more into jQuery in the very near future.

Moving off the home page is a custom category template where, if need be, a different header graphic can be displayed for each category. Too keep the template file to a minimum, this is all driven from 2 php files and 1 css file. Normally you could build out 1 category template for each category, but with over 20 cats, that would get to be a bit unweildy. Same goes with the CSS. It’s just easier to keep all those category page specific styles in their own file. Turns out, I am not doing the individual templates, but should minds change, it’s ready to go.

From there, it’s just a normal single.php and index.php to display everything else.

Something new I’m having to deal with is user accounts. No comments without first creating an account and all that. I did it once and did not like the fact that a regular user, upon logging in, sees the WP Dashboard. A quick google search got me a hack for wp-login.php that redirects on login to whatever page I specify. Very very cool. I will be adding a login area anywhere that is needed to keep normal users from seeing either the WP login page or the Dashboard.

And, of course, since I have user logged in or not information, I’m able to do some cool if-else magic for displaying ads or not, changing sections of the page, or not. Pretty much whatever I want to do. Could probably have a completely different theme for users that are logged in if I wanted to. Very very cool stuff.

In total there are 17 template files, 4 files for the script that runs the slider and 3 CSS files. By far the most involved theme I have ever built. And right now it is 100% operational. I need to do a little tweaking on the layout yet plus run it through IE.

I hope it passes.

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It definitely looks more like an application now, as opossed to something that runs in the browser.

Newest feature that rocks?

Quick edit, right from the manage posts screen. Sweet! Also built-in automatic upgrade. It’s about time. That will definitely make it easier to install the always-too-soon updates to WP.

So far, this theme and most of the plugins check out. There is a minor problem with the Viddler plug-in and the dashboard page, but it’s working well otherwise.

If you are wondering if you should update, I would. Might as well get it out of the way. With the auto-updater built in, the next update should be a piece of cake.

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I’m sure you’ve seen the front page of donburnside.com or even the Motoringfile News Room. I built both of them using features built into WordPress and nothing else. How did I do it?

Start by checking out this page at the Codex.

Retrieves an RSS feed and parses it. Uses the MagpieRSS and RSSCache functions for parsing and automatic caching and the Snoopy HTTP client for the actual retrieval.

If you scroll down the page a little bit there is an example of what you need to get things working. In my testing, I started with that as a base and modified it for how I needed it to look and work. Once you get it working the way you want, what do you do with it?

I built custom page templates within the WordPress theme that included the code to pull the RSS feeds I wanted. Then, I created a page with a title and used that custom template for the page. If you are familiar with modifying WP template files or creating custom template files, then it should be easy for you too.

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