Again from the Ashes…

Let me start off by apologizing for the outright disregard to produce any content at all on this site in the past months! I follow hat up by saying….There’s a great reason why! Once again the Phenix will be rising from the ashes and spreading it’s new wings, this time in the form of a relocation and a change in occupation. Yes….you heard me correct, I am moving this weekend to the wonderful city of Dunwoody, GA to begin a new career as a Unix SME (Subject Matter Expert) with Global Payments, Inc. I won’t bore all of you with the details of why this move came about, but rest assured it something that myself and my career desperately needed. This move also means that sometime in the near future I will need to migrate “The WebRoot” (the server which hosts all of my wonderful sites). It will more than likely be a weekend between now and April 18th and hopefully will only be down for 48 hours max. As I do not yet have Internet Service at my new place, I will not be quite as “connected” as I have been in the past several years. I will be reachable via my cell, GV, and e-mail. I will probably be searching for a Starbucks or McDonalds with free WiFi to satiate my need for the internetz in the meantime, but access will be limited. For any of you in the Atlanta area, please give me a call and hang out, as I am sure I will be extremely lonely! That’s it for now, I’ll try to post an update once I am settled in Dunwoody!

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Theatrical Limitations

Over the years I’ve seen too many movies for my own good. I started movie going at the ripe age of 3 or 4. My Mothers first job after my prents divorce was at the local theater in Moultrie. She was blessed with the ability to take me to work with her, place me in a seat in the back of the theater, and leave me be (coming in often to check on me of course!). Over the years, the “Moultrie Twin,” as it was called, became a second home to me. I watched virtually every movie that came through there (many multiple times) until I went off to college. Even now, I enjoy spending a lazy day doing nothing but watching movies. Netflix has been the bane of my productivity!

Anyways, the point of this is……I’ve seen a lot of movies! Through watching so many movies, I’ve become quite desensitized to violence, vulgarity, and outright debauchery. From rude and lude comedies, gory and gruesome horror flicks, and over the top violent action films, I’ve seen it all. I found myself in the last 4-5 years honing in on a specific niche of films that would make most folks vomit! I used the general terminology, “Fucked Up!” to describe such films. Most fall into the genre of Psychological Thrillers, but many also wiggle themselves into movies that cover other genres, sometimes feigning the appearance of a “NORMAL” movie! I’m not some ethically vacant, demoralized, sadistic, psychotic, heathen (I know that’s what you were thinking!), I enjoy these movies for one main reason. I believe the cinema of today has sold out.
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Atlanta WordCamp

So the Atlanta WordCamp that went down this past weekend was interesting. I didn’t look into attending until last minute, and registration was closed. I ended up attending as a volunteer with the “Genius Bar” setup they had. The volunteer route got me in for free, and gave me the opportunity to see a couple sessions in addition to helping out a myriad of people with various WP related problems. The WordCamp was held at the Atlanta SCAD campus, which gave me the opportunity to browse through some really great student artwork in my spare time! The entire event seemed to be executed with extreme efficiency, as every detail was planned out. I hope to see more Atlanta WordCamps in the future with Matt and other speakers in attendence (including myself!).

The weekend also brought the opportunity to hang out with my Buddy CC and his lovely lady Jen! We had a great time at Taco Mac with Jarrett, and at the Darkhorse Tavern/10 High Club with Metalsome karaoke. I was also afforded the opportunity to spend some time with my family. It’s been a while since I’ve visited with them on their own turf. My cousins Hannah, Libby, and Abby are growing up so fast!!! Needless to say, the weekend was a much needed escape.

-Phenix

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WP Post Scheduling Mishap

I recently had to help someone I host a site for solve a very strange issue with post scheduling after an upgrade to 2.9 on his WP site. I’ve hosted many WP sites over the years and have never had this problem personally, so I had to dig around a bit.

The Issue:

When the time allotted for a scheduled post to be published occurs, the post is not published, and a message within the Admin panel only says “Missed Schedule.”

After perusing around the WP forums for a bit, I came to realize that this is a hot topic for many 2.9 early adopters. After looking deeper into the forums, I found that this has been a potential issue with Wordpress versions since the release of 2.7. Some say the “Missed Schedule” mishap can be caused by a temporary “hiccup” with a site’s DNS. As I manage the DNS for the particular site I host, I knew this to not be the case. Further research did indeed provide me with a solution.

The Solution:

Apparently with all the new fancy upgrades to the WP core, a significant amount of time (in the web world this means milliseconds!) has been added to the time it takes to run the job that actually publishes a post. From what I can tell this is due to the number of hooks that data has to be run through to make it from the edit page as a draft, to the front page of your blog as a live post. The addition of running it through the scheduling cron job pushes it too far. Can’t we just extend the allowable time to publish a post you say? Here you go:

The time limit is set around line 230 in the /wp-includes/cron.php file. The default line will appear as such:

230
wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

As you can see, the limit is set to 0.01 seconds by default. I tried increasing the value in increments, and finally decided on 20 seconds. You may find that this can very from server to server, so play around with it for a bit to optimize it for your setup. So here’s the updates line:

230
wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 20.0, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

So there you go! If you’ve found yourself upgrading to a new version of WP and you are unable to successfully publish a scheduled post, try this out!

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ZebluePrime Gets New Digs!!!

So ZebluePrime got new digs last night…….errr maybe he just washed them really! I helped him setup his own domain (zeblueprime.com) to get him off of a sub-domain i let him borrow (previously evan.phenixblue.com). Along with the domain setup there were a few changes to make within his wordpress install to make everything go smooth.

I try to keep a directory structure similar to this within my webroot:

WEBROOT/

/domain1.com

/domain2.com

/domain2.com/sub1.domain.com

/domain2.com/sub2.domain.com

/*********************DISCLAIMER***********************************/

PLEASE BACKUP YOUR DATABASE AND FILES BEFORE PERFORMING ANY OF THE FOLLOWING!!!

Step 1: Migrate files from old sub-domain to new domain directory

#sudo mkdir /WEBROOT/zeblueprime.com

#cd /WEBROOT/phenixblue.com/evan.phenixblue.com/

#sudo cp -R  * ../../zeblueprime.com/

#cd ../../zeblueprime.com/

#ls -la


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