Wordpress

Scheduled Posts in Wordpress 2.5+ Fail For Some Users

**Note - I have found a fix for some users. Check back on Monday and all will be revealed.

It seems that for some users scheduling posts in Wordpress does not work in versions 2.5 and higher. This problem does not occur for all users and seems to be related to the web host they are using and possible security settings. Ultimately, however, the problem is in Wordpress as scheduled posts worked in earlier versions.

It is my understanding the the problem may be with the cron.php file that is in the wp-includes folder. Cron jobs deal with scheduled events and for some reason this file is not communicating properly with the server.

There is not simple fix or solution to this problem. Some fixes work for some users but not for others. I know of two people using the same webhost who currently can not schedule a post. Well, the can schedule it and set the time but when the time to publish arrives it doesn’t publish and the time starts counting backward. For example, a post is scheduled for 4:40PM. That time passes and 10 minutes later it will say scheduled to post on 10 mins. Forty minutes later it says scheduled to post in 40 minutes. The scheduled post, however, is never published until it is done manually.

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Wordpress - Sort Your Search Results by Relevance Rather Than By Date

Have you ever searched your own Wordpress site for an article you wrote a couple of months ago? Have you been dismayed that the article is not one of the first found results even when you know the title of the article? This is because Wordpress sorts search results by date rather than relevance. For example, when I search on ‘Environmental Resources’, I want the first result to be my article, ‘Green Twitter: Environmental Resources‘. Instead Wordpress will give me a list of all the articles that mention that title in descending order. Since, I frequently link to my own articles, I am given a list of search results that aren’t that useful.

The solution to this problem is provided by a simple plugin install. Search Reloaded, once installed and activated, will sort articles by relevance, so when I do the search mentioned above I get the expected results. The plugin does this by using the search algorithm in your MySQL database rather than the default Wordpress search algorithm. The results aren’t perfect but are SO much better than what is provided in Wordpress.

Search Reloaded requires Wordpress version 2.3 and higher.

To use:

1. Download
2. Extract file from zip
3. Upload to your plugins folder
4. Activate
5. Enjoy

I recommend searching the same term before and after installing the plugin so you can see what a difference it makes.

photo credit: g.originals

2 out of 2 Commenters Recommend Subscribe to Comments Plugin for Wordpress

What? Not everyone likes and dislikes the same things that I do?

I tend to forget that my likes and dislikes are not the same as others’. I made the mistake of not offering an option on my site because it isn’t something that I would use. I’m not going to classify this as excessive pride. Instead, I’m going to look at it as caring about my own needs rather that the needs of my readers. And this is a mistake, potentially a big one.

Last week I discussed commentful, which I use for tracking comments that I leave on other sites. I asked what other people use to track comments. Both Scam and Trisha said that they like to subscribe to comments via email and use that feature when the plugin is installed.

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Full of Things to Say? Track Your Comments with Commentful

I never used to leave comments on blogs. I lacked the confidence. I didn’t think I had anything to contribute. Since I started this site, I have made a point to leave comments. Now, I enjoy the interaction with others. Well, usually. The most enjoyable sites to comment on are one’s where the author responds and appreciates her community.

As I started commenting more, I found it difficult to keep track of where I had commented. Sometimes I would ask a question and then forget to return and see if there was a response. I’ve tried a couple of solutions to this and am currently using commentful by blogflux.

I am intrigued by Disqus, especially since the new Wordpress plugin which syncs Disqus with Wordpress, but am hesitant to install it. For example, they had an outage last night, which affected comments. At least when I am in complete control I only have to worry about the stability of my web host, which, after 5 great years has not been so good lately.

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Twitter Tools Digest Post Worked for 4 Days, Then it Beckham Flopped

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I learned to exclude Wordpress categories from appearing on the main page and archives of my web site. I did this because I wanted to archive my tweets using the Twitter Tools digest feature. It mostly worked but I ran into a couple of problems with my code in that the category was still showing up in my list of recent posts. I still have not figured out how to correct that problem, although admittedly I haven’t spent much time working on it. As I mentioned, I discovered the Ultimate Category Excluder Plugin, which did the same thing I was trying to do via code.

Unfortunately, even though I learned a lot, this was an a futile exercise. Four days after setting this up, the Twitter Tools digest stopped posting. It worked wonderfully for four days and then nothing. I thought that perhaps there was a plugin conflict but I haven’t found any. I searched Google for solutions to this problem but found others having the problem but no real solution to it.

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Don’t Rely on Your Host and Lose Your Blog - Backup Wordpress

Yesterday I discussed backing up your hard drive, so today I thought it would be good to talk about backing up your Wordpress database.

Yes, I know, your webhost has daily backups but do you only want to rely on that? Read Scam’s comment on yesterday’s post. His host was backing up a corrupt version of his database. And a webhost that I used to use had some backup problems and I lost a couple days worth of data for another site.

I am using the Wordpress plugin, Wordpress Database Backup (tricky name, huh?). I use the scheduled backup by email option and have it sent to my gmail account. I then use a filter in gmail to have the backup sent to trash. Gmail stores 30 days worth of messages in the trash so I will always have the last 30 days of backups. I don’t completely trust the plugin so I do check the trash two or three times a week to make sure the backups are there - I have this set as a recurring task in my calendar. Since I have three separate wordpress installations, three database backup files are being created and filtered to the email trash daily.

The website for the plugin contains the installation and configuration instructions, which are straightforward.

What I have not yet figured out is how to automate a backup of the rest of the files associated with my site; the templates, plugins, images, etc… If anyone has an automated system for doing this I would love to hear about it.

Related Posts Account Suspension

Yesterday my site had the most unique visitors ever and I was feeling like maybe I could be somewhat successful with it. Then, today everything went awry. I wanted to send a link to my Twitter Tools article and found that my site was not available. Since I was at work, I already had to click through Web”Non”sense to access it and my first impulse was that work had completely blocked my domain. I then realized that the suspension notice was coming from my webhost. I immediately started panicking: Is everything backed up? What went wrong? Why now after finally getting some traffic? Is my webhost going to reinstate me?

I then ran into my second problem. My webhost is also blocked by Web”Non”sense and I could not send in a support ticket. Since it was close to lunchtime, I live close to work and my boss was not in the office I decided to go home and see if this could be resolved quickly.

I got home and contacted my host who told me that my site had been suspended due to excessive server load and they provided me with log files that showed the problem. Surprisingly enough, it was not this site causing the problem but was a Wordpress installation in a subdirectory for eleblog, my elephant news site. That surprised me because I’ve been running eleblog for almost 6 years and have not made many changes to it recently. I had, however, installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and thought that was the culprit. Anyway, I told my host that I would remove the problematic plugin(s) and they immediately reinstated my account. Once I contacted them, the problem was resolved in 30 mins so I highly recommend Total Choice.

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