Tag Archives: WordPress

We’re Baaack!

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I apologize to those who’ve tried to visit the site this weekend and couldn’t see it. Apparently when I upgraded one of my plugins (WP Super-Cache, which normally improves performance on the site), it tried to enable a feature on the server that it didn’t have permission to turn on. Whenever it tried to load a page from the cache, it would run into the permissions problem and show a “500 Internal Server Error” page.

Of course, since I was always logged in when I looked at the site, it never tried to load the page from the cache, so I never saw the error. I even made a few posts.

Reminder to self: When updating plugins, always test the site both while logged in and while not logged in!

Technical details: The .htaccess file in the wp-content/cache folder didn’t have permission to turn on expiration (the error in Apache’s logs was “ExpiresActive not allowed here”). Solution: add “AllowOverride Indexes” to the folder’s area in the server configuration.

State of the Blog (Dec 2008)

A couple of notes on recent changes here at Speed Force:

1. You may have noticed a welcome banner appearing from time to time on the site. That’s something I’ve been trying out here and at K-Squared Ramblings, and presents an appropriate message to viewers coming from various search sites and social networks. In theory you should only see it once, or at most once a week, if you allow cookies. It’s powered by the Wp Greet Box plugin.

2. I’ve been trying to balance software speed with download speed, especially for visitors on mobile handsets. I used to run WordPress Mobile Edition, which tries to detect most phones and other small-screen, low-bandwidth devices, but it doesn’t work well with server caching. Since I upgraded to a G1 phone, I’ve been trying out WPTouch, which presents a clean interface on the iPhone and on phones that run the Android browser. If you read this site with a mobile device, please let me know how well it works. I’ll probably be tweaking this some more.

3. I’ve updated to a new version of WordPress. Actually, I’ve jumped the gun a bit by installing the WP 2.7 release candidate. (I’ve also dropped the WP_Identicons plugin in favor of the built-in Identicon support, but it generates different avatars than the plugin did. Sorry if you liked your old one better!)

The new version supports threaded comments, but the theme I’m using isn’t compatible with them. I’ll take a stab at updating it manually this weekend.

Anyway, there may be some wonkiness with the upgrade. If you stumble on something odd, please let me know.

4. Holding steady at #8 on Comic Blog Elite. Or at least I was until today.

5. Can’t believe I missed the six-month mark. Half a year! The downside is that I’ve been somewhat neglecting updates at Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning in order to keep this going.

6. More social networking coming up. I’ve added the Twitter account SpeedForceOrg, and I’m working on something to tie this into Facebook. (And yeah, I’ve got a backlog of friend requests. Sorry about that.)