Broken
My website has started off the new year by breaking in a puzzling way. All the widgets on my homepage that are created with PHP are gone. (This applies to individual post pages too.) At first I thought PHP was broken - but no, I was using my own PHP5, and I didn’t change anything. So I fell back on the Dreamhost install of PHP 4.4.2, and that didn’t fix it. I changed it to the Dreamhost install of PHP 5.1.2, which is a slightly newer version than the one I was using (5.0.9), but that didn’t fix anything either. What’s really weird is that my admin side is working fine, and other websites I run that use PHP are fine. A says that if I didn’t change anything, then Dreamhost must have - but I can’t figure it out. It seems like if it’s only affecting the produced version of my journal (and the actual layout is fine, that is also constructed by PHP, it’s just the widgets that aren’t working), then it must be something in the journal design? Right? Hello? I’m so confused.
Added: Also, when I made this post, WordPress asked me if I was sure I wanted to add this post. I said yes, and it posted, and it was fine. But now I’m thinking something is up with my WordPress (which is self-installed 2.0.4), so I’m going to upgrade…
Resolved: Holy crapola. Apparently all of my King Text widgets got set to not run PHP; I have no idea why I didn’t figure this out faster. I also discovered an issue with WP 2.0.5 that caused WordPress to ask me for confirmations for some things; it turns out this is related to FastCGI and can be fixed with the WordPress 2.0.5 Tuneup plugin.
Filed under daily life | Comment (0)Mission Accomplished: Widgets!
I did it! Almost entirely by myself, with just a bit of help from Mark of Weblog Tools Collection, I widgetized my design. I now have 13 instances of the King Text plugin running, each containing the code from my original sidebar. I was not able to find a way around the problem of the title falling inside the widget, so I had to stick with modifying the plugin code, but the King Text plugin accepts both PHP and HTML so I can put whatever I like in there. If I want to add additional widget plugins, I will have to edit those too, but for now I got everything running how I want it.
I did have to make one sacrifice: the sidebars are now fixed-width rather than liquid. This is because the percent sign I was using for the liquid layout was getting tossed out by the PHP running on the plugin. It’s not a huge deal, I can always adjust the width if necessary, but it isn’t quite perfect.
But damn, I did what I want, how cool is that?!
Filed under site design | Comment (0)VIF: Very Important File
Well, I screwed up my site big-time. I was trying to make WP-Validator work, but I have close to 10,000 entries for it to analyze (that’s posts + comments) and so it needs altered max_execution_time and memory_limit variables. While I was playing around with different ways to resolve this, I managed to delete my custom php.cgi file. Oops. Most of my website is built on PHP - photo galleries, weblog, personal FTP, everything.
So I tried reinstalling custom PHP, but it broke. I filed a support request, choosing the OMG EXTREME CRITICAL EMERGENCY!! EVERYTHING’S BROKEN! People are DYING! option for the first time ever. I realized that the error I had gotten when it died was that the process was killed, and DreamHost occasionally kills processes for no apparent reason, so I figured I’d try again. This time it broke in a different way at the same point, but apparently it was enough for my journal.amanita.net domain to start working again. I’m glad I moved it from /amanita.net/journal to /journal.amanita.net because I think that’s what helped fix it.
Unfortunately my personal FTP and photo galleries are still down; I assume anything that’s actually on amanita.net itself is dead. I am assuming my journal has fallen back on the default PHP installation used by DreamHost; at this point I am more than happy to have it all go back to the default!
Oh. I just removed from my amanita.net .htaccess file the part that told it to look for my custom install. Now everything is using the default DreamHost installation of PHP, and my personal FTP and photo gallery seem to be fine. I’m going to leave my support request in place because I would like to know what happened when I tried to install my custom PHP (the part that broke), but it’s not nearly as critical now. There’s no way to change the priority on the ticket, but if any DreamHost people are reading this, well…get back to me when you can, okay? Filed under internet | Comment (0)
Widgetizing
This will probably not be of interest to anyone who isn’t into PHP, WordPress, and/or Sidebar Widgets.
I am having bizarre results trying to widgetize my design. The biggest concern I have is that I need the widget title to be outside the $before_widget code. I figured out how to do this by altering widgets.php and rearranging the order to be $before_title, $title, $after_title, $before_widget - but this is not an ideal solution, for a few reasons. First of all, it means I’m messing with stuff that wasn’t designed to be messed with by the likes of me! It means I’m slightly changing the code of the widget authors, and I don’t want to to do that. I would be just fine with only using text-input widgets that run PHP, because then I could just copy the code directly from the existing sidebar rather than fussing with various types of widgets.
I want to widgetize my design (which is originally an open-source design by Christopher Ditto, but I have modified it a lot, so I’m calling it my design) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t like having the second sidebar’s code buried in the footer. Second, there are great big chunks of tables and whatnot that come before and after each section, to make the pretty little boxes with the funky corners, and I’d like to not have to look at that every time I want to edit my code. I suppose I could do it by using includes…I’ll have to give that a try, it will at least get things more tidy if I can’t actually use the widget functions.
I got the sidebars installed and working - I figured out how to have two of them, etc. - but in addition to not placing the title where I want it, the boxes are just coming out wrong. I don’t know if this is a result of the default code on each widget, or what - but I’m getting repeated top corners, lines extending too far, and other weird stuff that shouldn’t be happening, since I’ve pulled the before/after code straight from the existing sidebar, which works fine.
And this is totally weird. While I was messing around with widgets.php, a little “www” appeared in the upper left corner of both my design and the WordPress admin screens. I have no idea where it came from or why it was there. When I went back to a clean, unedited copy of widgets.php, it went away. I was also experiencing failures in functions.php whenever the Sidebar Widgets plugin was deactivated - I had to rename functions.php to something else just so I could use the admin side. Additionally, there were gaps between the section titles and the boxes - I don’t know where those came from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was related to whatever was making the boxes come out funny.
I seem to remember seeing someone who offered to widgetize any theme, for a fee. Part of me wants to do it myself, but part of me is so clueless about how to fix these errors that I’m considering passing it off to someone. I can’t figure out what site offered it, though, so for now I’m stuck doing it myself.
Filed under site design | Comment (0)Fanlisting Conversions
Thanks to inspiration from the Quilting Bee message board, I spent today messing about with fanlistings. I had tried before to convert to Enthusiast 3 and it broke horribly, so I gave up and went back to Fanbase. This time I managed to get all seven of my owned FL’s converted successfully from Fanbase to Enth3, and tonight I manually converted 135+ joined FL’s from Flinx to Enth3. The amusing thing is that I spent many hours today doing something that is utterly pointless - there is no meaning behind fanlistings whatsoever. If you want to see what I was working on, though, my joined and owned fanlistings are now here.
Filed under internet | Comments (3)Everybody Shut Up
I am finally fed up enough with the usual Friday chattering and slacking at work that I have turned on Launchcast to try to tune them out. Music is not a major part of my life, so I almost never do this; I also have it incredibly low - I almost can’t hear it when I’m typing on my clickety keyboard. And yes, I am aware that I am sucking bandwidth, but they’re all just gabbing anyway rather than using their computers.
I am disappointed, because I forgot that the PHP editor I was using was not shareware - it expired after 30 days. I liked it because it was almost an IDE - it had a web server built in, so all I had to do was install PHP on my machine and I could view my work right in the program. It’s 35 euros ($41), though, and I’m not at a point where I can justify that. I do occasionally buy software, and if I were really skilled with PHP I would purchase this editor, but I’m still messing around with it. So now I can use either HTML-Kit or TextEdit and upload work to my site to test it, or I can just edit the stuff right on the site (I use a locally-installed version of net2ftp), but that would be bad because there would be no syntax highlighting. And I like syntax highlighting! PHP Expert Editor’s was the best, but the other two at least have it as an option. But oh hey, I just looked at the HTML-Kit plugins - there’s a whole lot that make PHP development easier. Okay, so I will probably use HTML-Kit even though I find all the buttons and menus somewhat overwhelming. Still doesn’t have a webserver, but it’ll have to do.
Filed under internet, site design | Comment (1)Yawn
Why am I so tired today? Just a couple of small notes. We’re watching Born into Brothels right now…somehow it’s not what I expected, but I don’t know what I did expect. I’m also frustrated with FanAdminPlus which lets members join without specifying which fanlisting they’re trying to join, so I have four orphaned members. It worked fine at the beginning, I had a couple of people join normally, but the most recent four aren’t working. I was using PHPFanBase before and it was fine, but it was a lot of work to make the switch to a centrally-oriented admin script so I would like to stick with that. I’m going to try Enthusiast instead. Sigh.
Added, midnight: I ended up reverting to PHP-Fanbase. I couldn’t figure out a way for Enthusiast to import members, and I still had the tables from when I’d converted away from PHP-Fanbase, so I went back to it. Took a while, but it’s taken care of. I had to e-mail a couple of people and ask them which FL they’d been trying to join, but others who had joined through FanAdmin Plus I just added manually.
Filed under daily life | Comment (0)Bulletin Board Conversion
Tonight I am attempting to convert my community site from PHP-Nuke to Invision Power Board. I tried to just use the PHPbb converter for IPB, but that didn’t work too well. I am presently converting from PHP-Nuke to PHPbb (ironically, I did the reverse quite some time ago), and from there I will try the IPB conversion. Unfortunately, PHP-Nuke uses standard dates while PHPbb uses Unix-style dates, so I am manually converting everything (with some help). Fortunately I only have about 160 users, and I’m almost done.
Also, we’ve had CBS on for a little while, because neither of us is really watching and we can’t be bothered to change it. The show Threshold is on right now, and Brent Spiner is a regular on it! I had no idea. Whee! Yes, I am a huge geek.
Added: That took me a couple of hours and I have very little to show for it. I managed to convert from PHP-Nuke to PHPbb successfully, that was fine. But then I had the same problem with the conversion to IPB, which leads me to think that I didn’t need to do the Nuke-PHPbb conversion after all. I ended up dumping the PHPbb installation altogether; I stashed the tables in my Nuke database so I haven’t lost all that work at least. I dumped the IPB installation too. Maybe I will try again later, maybe not.
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