Chris & Joy's Critterweb » Geek Stuff

Holy Sh** – I fixed it! And I am not even sure how :-)

Chris — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:40:14 +0000

Woo Hoo!

The WPG2 plugin has been restored so that the blog is back to it’s happy self. I haven’t had a lot of time to work on this, but it’s been nagging at me and making me crazy. I had posted on the WPG2 forum to no avail, and was going to contact my webhost and see if they had a fix. While I was driving yesterday, it occurred to me to try one last time to delete and replace the files themselves. I had done this before and it didn’t fix it, but this time it did. I don’t even care that I don’t know how I fixed it, I’m just glad it’s working.

The problem is that WPG2 has been orphaned and is no longer being developed. I assume that at some point, a few upgrades down the road, I am going to have this problem again if Wordpress or Gallery2 significantly change their code. Gallery3 is out there on the horizon, and while currently there doesn’t appear to be support for embedding in Wordpress, maybe that will be added later. Or maybe someone else will pick up WPG2 and continue on with it.

Arrrggghh

Chris — Fri, 07 May 2010 00:34:15 +0000

The Critterweb is still going through some difficulties which apparently were due to the server the site was hosted on becoming unstable. There were no database backups so I’ve had to work to repair the old one, and just haven’t had a lot of time to work on it. Due to all this I’ve had to move the whole site which was a bit tricky with both Wordpress and Gallery2 databases to relocate. It’s mostly fixed but I am still working at getting the integration with the blog back up and running. In the meantime it can be accessed directly but keep in mind there are still a few issues I am working on. If you see a broken photo link, please let me know!

Deep freeze

Chris — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:38:01 +0000

The new year started with some unseasonably chilly temperatures (it’s 17 degrees now and never did get much warmer than that today) and there’s no end in sight to that. Heat pumps notoriously don’t do well below 20 degrees but so far we’re managing to stay warm. The gas log fireplace rocks – though the addition of a fluffy orange devil to the household necessitated an emergency fireplace screen purchase. We just hope the cold spell breaks soon.

Speaking of frozen things, our computer is still borked. So if we’ve missed replying to anyone’s emails or anything, we apologize. This post is coming from one of the two frankenlaptops as the desktop is in the midst of a second attempt at a Windows XP repair install, which appears to be hung at the same spot the first install failed at. The next (last ditch) step is a full Windows reload. I’ve already removed the video card and KVM switch, and ran memory, hard drive, and CPU tests. This is NOT how I had envisioned spending the last three day weekend we’ll have in a while.

The freezeup happens in a selective startup and even safe mode. It *didn’t* happen when booted to a Linux CD which is why I am trying the repair or reload Windows options, but my gut says this is a hardware issue, leaning towards “USB controller” but I’d love to be wrong. It just isn’t worth it to replace a motherboard on an older computer and a new one was not in our budget at this time.

We also engaged in our traditional holiday vet-fest – Dandelyon went in yesterday, for his upper respiratory infection that he came home from the shelter with, and Winter today, for the probable same infection. She’s got a 103.5 temperature and a voice like a woman who’s been smoking two packs a day for at least thirty years. The URI wasn’t totally unexpected; with Joy working at the shelter, me volunteering there, and the new kitten, someone was bound to come up with the crud. What was unexpected was the previously undiagnosed heart murmur that Winter apparently has that the vet discovered tonight.

Ah, never a dull moment in the critterweb household…

Happy New Year to all! If the posts are few and far between in the next little while, it’s our computer’s fault. We’re still out here, drinking hot tea to stay warm.

Do not adjust your sets

Chris — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:54:27 +0000

We have a bunch of pictures to post, and something I wanted to put up for New Year’s, but I can’t get our computer to stay unfrozen long enough to do any of that and have spent the past few days troubleshooting what’s wrong with it, instead. It’s an old-school freeze-up, like in the early days of Windows where the entire computer becomes unresponsive and you have to hit the power button – nothing in the event log, no error messages. I am sort of feeling a Windows reload coming on and I hate having to do that — it always seems to take forever to get things back the way they were before. Anyway, hopefully we’ll get things back up and functional soon.

Growing Pains

Chris — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:32:59 +0000

As you can see, the site is in the process of getting a major facelift. We liked the old theme but it lacked a few features I wanted (drop down menus, three column capability) and it was just time for a change. The new theme you see here, which is called Atahualpa, is actually Joy’s pick. We had it narrowed down to this one and another one called Suffusion that I actually favored just a bit more, but I had a devil of a time getting the embedded Gallery2 page to display correctly with either theme, and this was the one I was able to fix, so Joy wins.

There are a few things I don’t care for but they are mostly style issues and it’s just a matter of brushing up on my CSS skills to tweak it how I want it. The category structure will probably also change; back when the blog first started WordPress hadn’t implemented tags (or perhaps I hadn’t figured them out?) and a lot of the things I have in categories really should just be tags. Please let me know if you find anything broken!

Upgrade time again

Chris — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:29:28 +0000

The site may go a bit wonky over the next few days as I am preparing to upgrade WordPress and Gallery2 again as well as the plugin that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress. I’ve been putting this off for a while but figured I’d better just bite the bullet since some of the fixes are security related. I am backing everything including the databases up beforehand and this has gone smoothly in the past, but since our site uses a fair number of customizations and plugins, there’s always the potential for weirdness. If the site goes down for a bit, or just doesn’t look right, give me a few days to stomp out the bugs.

Update 5:00 PM: The major upgrade seems to have gone without a hitch and I have all sorts of new Wordpress features to play with. There was a much upgraded version of the embedded Gallery2 plugin — if you scroll down and look at the sidebar you can now browse the album folders right from the main blog. I decided to wait for a major update to upgrade Gallery2 itself but I did finally go through the blog and replace all the pictures that were lost in the Typepad migration a couple of years ago; I had put them in a category called “fixpics” so I’d be able to find them easily, and I don’t know if that is the name of a software program of some sort, but I’ve been getting some weird site hits from ‘fixpics’ searches. I’m glad to have it gone and the broken links finally repaired.

By the way, I should probably put some sort of link up for this but if you want to see just the latest updates for the photo gallery you can chose “View Latest Updates” from the main Gallery page’s ‘Album actions’ menu and you can bookmark the resulting page. Go there today and you’ll see some neat pictures of our apple tree that bloomed last week.

Some days I just shouldn’t touch a keyboard…

chris — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 19:00:32 +0000

OK, this is going to be another one of those posts that you might just want to skip over if you are not on the geeky side…

We’ve got a new computer (more on that later) and I am getting all the apps installed on it that I work with on a regular basis; somehow or another while trying to find the link for the Gallery Remote software I that I use to upload photos, I noticed on the home page of the critterweb.com site that the links at the upper right were broken. “Hmmmm…” I thought;Â I knew they originally worked, but couldn’t remember if I ever tested them after that last upgrade.

A quick bit of testing (I noticed that the Gallery link worked, and the other links worked if I clicked on the Gallery link first) pointed in the direction of a bad URL. There was an extra directory level specified there that didn’t need to be, and so it was going to my 404 page which also appeared to be broken and was generating a nasty PHP error.

About a half hour of research on Google, the download of a text editor that highlights syntax in code, and some scrutiny of the page in that editor revealed an extra single quote where there should not be one. Simple enough — that fixed the 404 page.

Next I tackled the bad URL… I went into the Options page of WordPress without really thinking about what I was doing, and pulled the ‘extra’ directory out of my WordPress site URL. Even as I clicked the Update button, a warning bell went off that I had just committed a major ‘oops’ but it was already too late to take it back. I now had no way to re-edit that page, as the WP_Admin folder was now unresolvable, the style sheet and header files for the site were also missing resulting in a garbled mishmash of text, and on top of all that, my smart-ass 404 page — which basically says something to the effect that the page was not found because Chris is an idiot (which in this case was true I guess!) — now appeared at the top of the mess.

I poked through the site’s configuration files and there was no way to change the ’siteurl’ value there, some more research led me to instructions on how to change it directly in the MySQL database, which meant I had to hunt down my Control Panel login info because I hadn’t installed SQLYog on this machine yet. Once I got in (and did a precautionary SQL dump before getting my happy little fingers into the tables) it was easy to fix. The site was now back the way it should be… sort of. The problem was that I then I realized that an image link was broken on one of the previously unviewable pages, another undetected casualty of the upgrade last month, I am guessing.

So… some more time gets wasted hunting down another copy of the file in question and uploading it. Then I load the page and I still can’t see it. Huh. More poking around to isolate the reason for that and lo and behold: in the course of all this I discover that directory browsing is enabled on the site – ack! A security no-no. I fixed the image link but now it was back to Google to find out how to disable this… I remembered it was an .htaccess option but didn’t remember the exact syntax and no way I was going to screw up the entire site by editing my root .htaccess with a wild guess. Finally I found what I was looking for and made the change (it’s “Options -Indexes” without the quotes on a line by itself, for anyone who may find this post in the future looking for the same fix) and everything is back to normal. I think. Damned if I am going to look any further and find something else to ~~screw up worse~~ fix!

You know, I think I’ll finish loading the software another day and go mow the lawn, which seems like a much safer venture for the few brain cells that seem to be firing in my head today.

Shiny new web site

chris — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:04:24 +0000

I just spent the better part of several hours backing up the two MySQL databases and all the files for this site, then updating all the software.Â We are now running:

Yeah, I know it doesn’t look any different, at least it shouldn’t (please report any glitches to me!) but it added some useful functionality, fixed some security holes and bugs, and it seems to have resolved the slow-loading issue.

I also replaced one of the pictures in the collage that makes up the page banner, Olive the blinded bee-cat is now Olive the party cat. It’s a bit dark and gloomy, but then again so is Olive most of the time so I guess it’s more or less appropriate.

Slow page loads

chris — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:19:16 +0000

For anyone else who has noticed that the site is suddenly taking an extra long time — a good 30 seconds or so — to load, I thought I would mention that I aware of it and am researching the cause. It seems to be more noticable in Firefox than in IE, for whatever reason. I recently added a Petfinder ‘Featured Pet’ block to the sidebar and thought that might be the cause, but when I remove it, it doesn’t load any faster.

Anyway, I *am* aware of it and looking into the cause. When I get a chance I am going to upgrade Wordpress from 2.1 to 2.2 and see if that helps, but first I have to back everything up and make sure all my plugins are compatible with 2.2.

When Geeks Hallucinate

Chris — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:41:24 +0000

I have been suffering from one of my periodic bouts of insomnia this week; this time, it’s not a problem with getting to sleep, or waking up in the middle of the night, but rather I just sort of drift through the entire night without feeling like I was ever truly asleep.

Yesterday morning the alarm went off and I just sort of rolled over, thinking “ugh, I feel like crap and this day is going to suck.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to get up. I wasn’t really asleep — I was aware of Maggie shuffling around in her crate, the cats moving around the house — but I suppose I was not exactly awake, either, because I found myself carrying on a conversation with a pixel.

The pixel was a transparent rounded cartoon cube, with arms sticking out the sides of the cube and skinny little Jiminy Cricket-ish legs below, and he was floating in the air. He also had a goatee, and I think, bushy eyebrows. I don’t remember what he was saying but he had kind of a gruff, scratchy voice. It made perfect sense to me that he was one of those one-pixel transparent gifs that were used a lot in web design for spacing, before CSS came along, but then I guess somewhere along the way I realized I was talking to an imaginary cartoon pixel and that I was dreaming or halucinating. The pixel disappeared and I plodded off to the shower to clear the cobwebs out of my head.

Isn’t it strange what sort of nonsense your brain conjures up? If someone told me to describe what I thought a transparent pixel would look like, if it was a ‘person’, and I’d probably have come up with something rather pixie-ish and ethereal, not a grouchy plump cube. Where the devil did THAT come from?

Hmm…. I wonder if I did a Google Images search on ‘transparent.gif’ or ’spacer.gif’ (the names most commonly used for spacer gifs) if the results would be blank?