computers – Page 14 – The PolyBlog

Installing Linux on a Netbook

March 4 2017

I have an old netbook, an ACER ASPIRE ONE. Not the most powerful of tools, and it is almost ten years old. It worked at the time for what I wanted it for — a simple laptop to use at a coffee shop, do some basic wordprocessing, maybe some web surfing, a bit of email. No graphics, no games, no media really, mostly just a portable wordprocessor.

Back in the late 90s, I was convinced there was a market for this type of product. So I went looking for it. Including a trip to Toronto to see if I could find a stripped-down laptop, not too large, preferably without a giant CD-ROM adding bulk and heft to something that didn’t need it. I tried a bunch, but all were either too big or WAY too expensive (I’m looking at you Sony!). In the end, I gave up. I tried upgrading my palm pilot to have a keyboard too, but the screen was just too small to be worth it. I ordered a wordprocessor-like device from Toronto to try it out, and for the cost of shipping, they let me try it with an option to fully return it. It was okay, but the screen was only a few lines, and while the weight and size were perfect, the power just wasn’t there.

I even exchanged emails at the time with David Pogue who was the tech writer for the NY Times to see if he knew of any devices out there that fit the bill. Nope, there weren’t any. There just wasn’t enough market to make it worthwhile to a producer — the market was heading towards desktop replacements and anything else was falling by the wayside.

Fast-forward almost ten years, and there were netbooks flooding the market. Small, compact, ran Windows, exactly what I had been looking for previously. More or less. Speed was still an issue, but the chip (the Atom processor) that made netbooks possible by reducing battery drain was also the reason for a limit to the speed and user power. But I wanted one, the price wasn’t bad, and it would finally let me be able to take notes in class (I think I was still doing my MPA at the time), surf at the coffee shop, take it with me on weekends, etc. In the end, it was good, but from time to time, I struggled to be truly “functional” because of the speed. Sometimes even scrolling through large Word docs or a PDF would almost feel like it was grinding to a halt. My needs shifted again, it was okay but not great, and the slow speed was challenging me when I could just do the same task later on the big computer at home, so instead, I would just read when I was in a coffee shop. As I said, the netbook was good, but not great, and I eventually stopped using it.

The big change that killed it was my smartphone, and later, my tablet. Suddenly, I could surf easily, quickly, and even if I couldn’t type long docs, email and surfing were WAY better on it than trying to struggle on the netbook. I have a keyboard for the tablet too, although I rarely use it.

Awhile back, I tripped over the netbook when I was doing some clean-up, and although it works, I wondered if perhaps I should add it to the recyclables sometime. Or dump it on ebay and let someone have a toy. Then, not too long ago, I was going through some news items for a tech feed I get, and there was this simple yet glorious heading — “Installing Linux on a Netbook”. I thought at first it was someone doing it as a “toy” project, no real functionality to it, more like doing it just to see if they could do it. Since I have plans to get into Raspberry PI stuff, I thought I’d read and see what it was like as a project. Imagine my surprise to find out people have done lots of this stuff already, and not just as a toy, but to strip away the Microsoft bloat and to have a real, live, functioning Linux machine that boots rapidly and runs quickly because there is no overhead.

Sure, there have been challenges in the past. Missing drivers is the obvious one…if the system isn’t widely used, Linux drivers may not exist for the pieces of hardware you’re working with. And honestly, I’d be dead in the water if that was the case. I know so little about drivers and hardware, but give me the software to configure, and I’ll make a lot of it dance. Even way back in the 90s, I was running a Windows 3.1 machine long past when everyone else had killed theirs, and it was still more than meeting my needs.

But if others had met those challenges, and we’re running Linux on a functioning netbook, and considered it actually “good”, was it worth a try? Apparently it was.

I read a few other articles, and as with all things Linux, realized the first question was going to be the same as with any machine — choose your flavour of Linux. Lubuntu looked like a working model for a number of people, including among people who were writing comparative articles with the pros and cons of each. While many of the subtle differences seemed lost on me, not being an aficionado of desktop clients in Linux, I did notice that the authors themselves had ended up their search with Lubuntu and liked it. A nice combination of power and simplicity. Puppy Linux was my second choice as an “easy for newbies” version, but I thought I would start with Lubuntu.

The steps to install are pretty straightforward in general:

Install Linux ISO on a flash drive using your main computer;
Boot your netbook from the flash drive;
Choose install;
Follow the prompts and menus.

It seemed simple enough, so I started working on Step 1.

INSTALL LINUX ISO ON A FLASH DRIVE

Kind of like the old floppy disk days of Windows or booting from a CD now, you put a bootable operating system on the drive, tell your netbook to boot from the drive instead of the hard disk, and Bob’s your uncle. Sort of.

First, you need to get it on the flash drive. You can do a lot of it manually, but a bunch of articles mentioned “Universal USB Installer” as their tool of choice, and since it seemed to automate Linux installs, I thought it sounded good to me. Free download, started the app, got it going, and it gives four questions to start:

Which distro you want…I’d already chosen Lubuntu, so easy enough;
Where the ISO file is…wait a minute, I thought it automated things? Yes, but you have to download the ISO file separately. Not what I had read, but whatever, easy enough to download myself. Grabbed the torrent version, just over 5 minutes of transfer time, no biggie, clicked back to tell the installer where the file was, and continued;
Which drive your flash drive is…lots of warnings about getting it right, but well, you are FORMATTING A DRIVE, so you always want to get that right anyway; and,
Set a persistent file size…umm, WTF does that mean? No clue. Well, I mean I do, I just don’t know if the considerations mean anything significant with Linux/Lubuntu. It says it’s optional, so I went with the default setting.

Didn’t take too long to install, just over a minute I think, with another 30 seconds in there to format the flash drive, a 4GB version I was using. I kind of expected that there would be some sort of “congrats, now test this or do that” message when it was over, but there wasn’t. Just “Done”, and when you click it, it closes. Umm, okay.

BOOT YOUR NETBOOK FROM THE FLASH DRIVE

This step seems to freak some people out for some reason, but I have no idea why. Have they never seen a bios message on their main PC before? Never had to tweak a hardware setting? Anyways, I had no concerns about this step. Which is why I went “Huh?” when it didn’t work. I went into the bios, it told me to reorder the boot priorities to change it from IDE first to Flash drive first, I did that (even though my screen says press F5 to go up and F6 to go down, and it’s actually the reverse, but I moved USB FDD to the top) and booted it up. Nope, ran Windows again. Hmm. Double-checked the priorities, nope, it accepted the changes, hmm. Looked online, found a reference that said to put USB HDD first. Except my flash drive isn’t a hard drive, it’s a flash drive. Wouldn’t FDD go first? That’s what the other articles said. Nope, it was right, it should be HDD first. Changed it to try it and everything booted fine.

CHOOSE INSTALL

This part was a bit of a surprise. There were six or seven options, including testing various hardware pieces, trying out Lubuntu without installing, etc. Nice choices. But I was already reasonably committed, others had tested things before me, so I went for the full install.

That’s where things started getting weird. I chose to try to connect to the internet to download some stuff as it went. Except I had two problems. First, it didn’t want to connect to my router for some reason. The router was there, it asked for the password, tried to connect, and nada. I’m not entirely sure of the backward compatibility of the new router but would have thought it should handle this okay. Second, I started having power problems. It was clear what was happening — after about 60 seconds of not pressing the keys, the system would go into sleep mode. I don’t remember having such draconian defaults for my power management, but it was possible near the end. Really annoying. I tried skipping it, and Lubuntu booted, but I wasn’t sure I had everything.

I played with the Lubuntu install just enough to find power management, reset everything to what I thought was more reasonable, and restarted the install, but I connected to my phone this time as a mobile hotspot — hoping that it would all work since most of the installs are small. Either that or I’m going to get warnings this month about being over my data limit. 🙂

I told it to install, pull updates as it went, and install third party software so that I would have all the basics to start with when it was done installing. And I got another surprise. It asked me if I wanted to dual-boot the machine and keep Windows as an option. At first blush, I was about to say no, and then thought, “Well, why not?”. I lose disk drive space, but I’m not talking huge media needs anyway, and if I need it, I have portable USB drives I can use not to mention lots of flash drives. And, most of the time, I just store to the cloud or email files to myself. I reset partitions, told it to proceed, and it gave me 105GB for Windows and 55GB for Lubuntu. I’m sure that’s more than enough for a small linux install, and I get to keep my Windows option in case I ever need it for something else, or someone else wants to use it without trying Lubuntu.

It took a while, completed all the install and the post-install cleanup, and other than entering language choices, keyboard layouts, local time and my name/password, it just bopped along until it finished. I rebooted, and this time I had 4-5 options, the first being Lubuntu and the last being to boot in Windows. It waited for my choice for a few seconds and when I didn’t do anything, it went to Linux by default (kind of like what happens on a SAFE reboot of Windows). The other three choices are one for advanced options for Ubuntu and two for different memory tests.

But midway through the boot, it died on me. Not crashed, I mean the power manager kicked in again and shut down. I thought it would be something in the bios settings, as it looks like it is over-riding the Operating System settings somehow. But I checked the bios and there are no settings to help. The desktop settings work exactly right. And if I press the power button, it resumes just fine. But it’s annoying and I’ll have to do some searching to get that figured out.

But other than that? It’s fully installed. It took me a little over an hour, and that included a full download of the various files so I could run the installer to create the Flash drive. Not a bad hour’s worth. Now I have a netbook that is charging, and tomorrow I’ll play with it.

I have five things on my to-do list:

Fix the power management time-out during boot;
Test the Windows boot;
Get it to connect to my network;
Install any additional software I need; and,
Browse in Firefox to see if I can get it accessing Gmail, etc.

I have to say, that was way easier than I expected.

Looking for data visualization tools in all the wrong places…

January 9 2017

So I confess that once upon a time, I paid for some of my living expenses through the fact that I knew how to work a computer for things like graphics and formatting. No, seriously, back in the early 90s, it made me stand out from other people, the fact that I knew how to work Lotus 1-2-3, Word and WordPerfect, dBase IV and, drumroll please, Harvard Graphics. At the time, I think it was version 3.0, and while people could do very basic graphs in Lotus, the real trick was to choose a variety of simple graphs in Harvard Graphics, add your data, and voila, you were good to go. Back in ’93, for my first job at DFAIT, we did a presentation for Cabinet where all the graphs were done in HG, in colour, and there were about 30 of them. Blew the Cabinet people away, colour slides. In government. Bear in mind that most departments had barely switched over from DOS to Windows, and we gave them a 60-page deck on the future of the Asia Pacific region. Bound.

Now, of course, most people do their graphs in Excel or Powerpoint. And I wanted to do one this week. I have 29 or so “goals” that I am tracking against “Level 1” progress, and I wanted some sort of cheap visualization of how I am doing towards reaching level 1. I started in Powerpoint, which really just replicates the software functionality of Excel, and while it was decent enough, I’m not a graph tweaking expert anymore. I used to be able to get HG get up and dance and look amazing…compared to the Excel graph I did, I feel like I regressed in technology.

So, I was curious. Are there any other data visualization tools out there that people use easily and, more importantly, are free? My friend Aliza mentioned Google Charts and I confess that I had heard it mentioned in passing, but since I had little use for it, I had never looked at it.

I should step back for a second though. I *did* experiment with a WordPress plugin or two a few months back, and well, I was never too satisfied with the result. I would love a simple visualization tool that keeps my data in WordPress, doesn’t add a lot of overhead, and has lots of tweakable options. The experience reminded me a lot of that saying about things being cheap, fast, or good, and you can only pick two. I never quite found what I wanted.

But Google Charts is pretty darn near it. You basically code a function in javascript, and while that may seem a bit more daunting for some, you do get nice code snippets to just copy and paste. Not as intuitive though when it comes to customizing the look and feel…a single page with all of the options would be great, but they are spread across multiple themes. I was using a DIFF Chart, and it was the best I saw…overlapping a bar chart on a previous bar chart, or in my case, putting a light colour to show the “goal” and a darker colour to show actual progress. In the end, though, it was a struggle to get it to format properly and to fit properly as an inline-block within WordPress. It was decent, lots of power, but it renders itself each time it is called, and it wasn’t quick. Plus, for some reason, it was adding a big gap at the top and the bottom of the page. I liked the embedding, but the rest was too much.

I moved on to a variety of other options:

Zing Chart — highly complex, and the options were not as intuitively laid out as Googel Charts;
Tableau — this is only available for download, and I haven’t tried it yet;
PowerView — a Microsoft option, but not available in the version of Excel I was running;
D3.js — A live data tool, I couldn’t even claim to understand how it worked or what I was supposed to do;
Fusion charts — looks pretty solid, but linking to it from WordPress wasn’t obvious, and thus a dead end;
Visual.IS — in addition to having to create an account, it had strong links to paid versions;
High charts — the type of chart I wanted wasn’t there;
Chartist — good mentions of it elsewhere, but the website is just on GitHub, and not as friendly to access;
Piktochart — although it requires an account to be created, the real challenge was that it is also aimed at infographics more so than simple charts, and for some reason, it starts with asking you about infographics vs. presentation vs. printable, i.e. you’re choosing your design and function before you choose anything about what you want to create and put into the presentation, etc.;
Ubiq — data visualization running with MySQL, and I was hoping to avoid a database element;
Vizydrop — pulls data from a datafile (CSV JSON or Excel), which I was also hoping to avoid, but may reconsider;
Plot.ly — no clue what it did as it just kept crashing;
Datamatic — uses Google Drive, which doesn’t sound problematic, except that GD is blocked by our firewall at work, so visualizations wouldn’t work if I wanted to put them on my screen as a reminder; and,
Hohli — I really liked this one, but it seems to be geared towards replacing the interface (or lack thereof) for Google Charts, yet with 1-time creation (i.e. couldn’t seem to save or edit/re-use later).

Which put me back in the world of Excel. I did a graph, and it looks fine. I have room for future expansion of data, which could be useful (kind of stacking option for Level 2). Not exactly quite what I was hoping for in terms of quality, but maybe that is just me needing to spend more time with Excel to make it pretty. I would LOVE to be able to recreate the DIFF chart look and feel of Google Charts. But it met my need for the day (to update on my progress on goals in Goals – Weekly roundup (#2017-01)).

WordPress, missed schedule, and why I don't run my own server

January 4 2017

The other night, I was browsing my posts list in my admin panel on the website and noticed something odd — my scheduled post for yesterday morning didn’t actually post. And right next to it in the internal WordPress admin panel was a nice little red warning called “missed schedule”. I had seen this before and thought it was just a glitch, no biggie — just click publish now and it goes live. No problem with the post, it just didn’t go live when it should have. I don’t often schedule future posts when I’m writing detailed posts, although I might change the time stamp to 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning even if I’m writing it at 1:00 in the afternoon, like now. Just a small quirk I do to manage an indexing protocol that checks the time stamp, no real reason.

However, from time to time, I will write a bunch of posts all at once, and I want them spread out over several days. So I “schedule” them for future publication, usually 9:00 in the morning. So, the question was, “Why didn’t they post?”.

Running around the WordPress community

As with most glitches with WordPress, one is often not the first person to encounter it. Simply googling “WordPress Missed Schedule” brought up a whole series of people who had the same problem, posed the question online and had people respond. In most cases, their problem was slightly different in config once I scratched the surface, or the solutions were a bit different than what would seem to fit my situation. However, they did send me looking into several plugins.

I tried a plugin called WP CRONTROL that wasn’t a fix so much as a way to glean some additional diagnostic information. Namely that the small “glitch” was bigger than I thought — my CRON file was not running, and there were problems going back to August. Hundreds of behind-the-scenes happen on your website without your having to control them directly, little bots that can run from time to time, and your website software or the server software has ways to schedule them. Basically the same as your CALENDAR on your computer keeping track of reminders, etc., or even your regular WINDOWS update that does certain things at regular intervals. In this case, WordPress has a file that keeps track of all things it has to do (its own internal to-do list) called WP-CRON. I started trying to clean out the long list of expired entries but it would take forever.

So I added another cron manager called ADVANCED DATABASE CLEANER. Sure, I could have logged into the PHP admin area of my website and manually cleaned things in my database, but why would I do that when this plugin would do it for me?

Down the rabbit hole

I went down a rabbit hole after that. Lots of little tips and tricks everywhere, but few that were specific enough to help me, nor even in a good logical fashion. More like eight hundred people playing hunches and trying something on their server, some with luck, some with none. I jumped the queue while I was working through some of the options and started chatting with the Server Customer Support Rep, but honestly, their Tier 1 people are more about sales than they are tech support. They do okay, but this is way beyond them.

What I often find helpful though is that explaining the problem to them seems to crystallize it better in my own mind, and often triggers thoughts to try x or y that hadn’t occurred to me earlier or that I dismissed too soon. And it gave me a structure for understanding how to solve the problem.

A. GET YOUR DIAGNOSTICS

As I mentioned above, I used WP CRONTROL to see the list of cron activities and ADVANCED DB CLEANER to fix it a bit. WP CRONTROL also told me there was a 403 error (forbidden) on the WP-CRON file, but it wasn’t very convincing since some of the other errors might be causing it.

After going around the pole a few times, I found a great little tool called WP CRON STATUS CHECKER. It only has a few hundred downloads/installs, and it is a great little tool. The plugin doesn’t have a lot of info with it, but it adds a widget in your dashboard that tells you the status of your CRON files. It DOES nothing to fix problems but it does a quick test to see if WP-CRON can even run, and if not, tells you the status (403, etc.). I wish I had found this first. It told me for sure part of the problem was that WP-CRON was not running. And once fixed, you can deactivate it and leave it off. If you leave it activated, it will run on its own every 24 hours to check, but my site isn’t busy enough that I need that level of monitoring.

B. CHECK .HTACCESS

HTML sites have a small file in the directories called “HT access” that controls how visitors can access the individual files in the directory and subdirectory and is the second line of defense against people doing silly things like writing files and overwriting certain files on your site. On sites like WordPress, it’s the equivalent of a master security file that controls a lot of the subsequent access rights.

Some sites said to see if .HTACCESS was corrupted, but I was pretty sure mine wasn’t (I have other plugins that check the status of HTACCESS regularly, they would throw flags if it was corrupted).

What the sites FAILED to mention was that it isn’t just simple CORRUPTION that could be screwing up WP-CRON, it could be the actual proper setup is messing with it. I should have thought of that immediately when I saw the earlier 403 FORBIDDEN message in WP CRONTROL, but when I saw it again in the WP CRON STATUS CHECKER, I knew I had found my problem. Unfortunately, I did this step sixth or seventh instead of second!

The simplest way to see if .HTACCESS is your problem is to temporarily rename it something like .HTACCESS_TEMP or .HTACCESSXX. Then check the status again — if it was .HTACCESS causing the problem, the status will go green when you check after renaming it. If it is still red, move on to other options.

C. CHECK SECURITY PLUGINS

I run WordFence and iThemes, and of all the types of plugins, security ones are the most likely to cause access issues like above and conflicts with other plugins or activities. So, I temporarily deactivated them and then checked my other settings. Nope, still broken, so that was out.

D. CHECK OTHER PLUGINS

Anyone who has had a problem with WordPress, or really any CMS ever, they know that the simplest way to look for a conflict is to just deactivate all your plugins. Considering some people are running TONS of plugins, this isn’t often the favorite solution, but it’s better than turning them off and on one at a time. I deactivated them all, checked status, still broken.

E. CHECK FILE PERMISSIONS FOR WP-CRON

Of course, lots of people would say to check this one first — if WP-CRON is the problem, the “obvious” first step could be to check the file permissions on that specific file to see if the settings are wrong. Good logic, but since WP sets them in batches, the reality is that other files would likely have the wrong settings too and would have thrown red flags much earlier. Remember that this is a low-level file that only flags errors when it DOESN’T run.

For me, I temporarily changed the setting to 777, full read/write/execute and checked status again. Still broken.

F. CHECK FOLDER PERMISSIONS FOR WP ROOT DIRECTORY

I can’t say this would have occurred to me on my own. If WordPress is running, the folder must be set pretty close to right, or the red flags would be borderline catastrophic for failure. Never the less, it was still worth a try — again, I changed to full 777 rights, no change, still broken.

Why did I do all those things?

If all those had failed, I would have eliminated the three most likely internal problems:

corruption of access files;
access / permissions to the file or folder; and/or
conflict from security or other plugins.

That leaves you three other options that I’ve seen:

Try a plugin called WP MISSED SCHEDULE. It isn’t on the main WP install directory, you have to do it manually from GITHUB. I’m personally leery of installing plugins that don’t reside in the WP repository, and on top of that, the installation instructions did not seem awesome for clarity. Lots of people have tried it and had it fail; others did it and said it worked; others said, “huh?”. I also feel like if the problem was any of the first five, this plugin would not fix any of those issues.
Check with your host to see if there is a server config issue. Lots of people have said very simply, “Oh, it’s a config issue, contact your server”, but that is a bit too reactionary. If it is any of the above issues, the server people won’t know how to fix the problem either and unless you’re paying a lot for access to their tech support personnel, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s a software issue, you’re on your own”. I used mine to get the ticket started, but I had resolved the diagnostic phase before we were done creating the ticket and I had figured out it was an .HTACCESS issue which they don’t help with anyway.
Bypass WP-CRON and create a server cron file to do it at the server level. Yep, to me that’s as advanced as it sounds. If you google, you’ll see lots of people who have written why they don’t use WP-CRON, why they turn it off, etc. Almost all of them are hardcore techies who are totally comfortable running LINUX, the type who would thumb their nose at building a Raspberry Pi project as “toys for kids”. If you go this route, and you have access to CPANEL setup, it really is a single line to tell it what to run and when, but I confess it didn’t work for me, and I didn’t want to mess around too much in that level of direct intervention

You might note that I’ve also left out the nuclear option of reinstalling WordPress from scratch. Honestly, that is pretty low on the list of probable solutions if you have done an upgrade from a previously working version and haven’t mucked around with the configuration too much recently. It *should* work, and if it doesn’t, something else is likely configured wrong, not your basic WP install. Always worth a shot of course, and many people would say to start with that in the first place. Who would say to do that? Those who did everything else, failed, tried a fresh install and it solved their problem and now they preach purity of install. 🙂

So what does this have to do with running my own server?

All of these problems? And I’m only talking about a SMALL software config issue that sent me way down the rabbit hole. If I was running my own server, I would have another 20 possible causes, all having to do with either server configuration or potentially even a hardware issue. One of the “saving” graces to paying someone else to carry the load of managing / running a server with a large hoster is that the cost/benefit ratio to me is WAY in my favour, particularly the number of times a problem like this has frustrated the hell out of me. I don’t need that added stress in my life. And if others are running the same install just fine on the big server, I know it is MY problem, not a technical screw-up that I did in the server setup. Worth it’s weight in gold.

As for me, now that I know it’s an HTACCESS challenge, I can push it to the back burner. I can work around it for now, and at some point, I’ll fix it. For now, I’m leaving it alone.

If you ended up here while searching for a solution, feel free to let me know how it’s going in the comments!

Version 3.3 of my websites: the software side

August 18 2016

As I mentioned in my earlier post this week (Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things), I have tried various applications to “run” the website. Early on, I used Microsoft FrontPage. Then I tried some out of the box HTML and ASP applications with names like GPEASY or EZ107. I eventually went bigger and tried various content management system (CMS) applications like Drupal, Joomla and even MediaWiki. None of them were quite right for me.

Some people have opted for commercial platforms like Blogger or WordPress.com and those were all viable options. But I always came back to running my own site with my own set of installs. I started small, I went bigger and bigger, I went up to a WordPress install, I dropped back, and then finally, I went all in on WordPress.

I would be the first to confess that it is WAY more power than I need. People run full company sites with this thing, including full e-commerce capabilities or thousands of users with forums and discussion groups.

Me? I need a blogging platform, comments, and just a bit of capacity to show videos and images. Occasionally I get fancy and run a poll or something, but mostly it is just me blogging and the sound of a dry lonely wind blowing across my front page, maybe with digital tumbleweeds rolling along. It is not high traffic. One of my favorite Pearls Before Swine cartoons suggests the one character’s blog would have more traffic if he wrote it in crayon on a bathroom wall, and that is probably true for my site. Once in awhile I touch a nerve and garner an uptick in viewers, particularly if I’m talking about HR or development. Other than that? Mostly me prattling on into the digital ghostlands of the internet.

Yet I still want that power of WordPress. As I mentioned in the previous post, I tried separating my various musing into two camps for awhile but my approach to my site was still pretty diffuse. Blogs I would write with a specific angle in mind on one site often would end up fitting better on the other site under a different heading. Not a big deal to move, just illustrative that my approach to my separation into two blogs was not very concrete.

And when I rearranged my setup into a single blog, I thought, “YES! This is what it is all about. Everything I write in one place. Awesome!”

However, I realized over time that it wasn’t quite as awesome as I had hoped. I post in bursts and spurts, often on a single theme. Someone looking for HR info doesn’t particularly care about the latest quote I might share or what’s going on in my personal life (sob). And the balance didn’t seem quite right at times, particularly when I started adding quotes or humour. So I started thinking again about separating the blog entries into two groups.

The first group is what you see here. The more personal side of my musings:

Posts about family or just daily experiences…the truly personal side of my life;
In the same vein, but a little less “directly personal”, some of my approach to life like goal-setting, learning including photography, and spiritualism;
A science and technology theme, in that I will be writing more about astronomy (a hobby) and computers (mostly about this site, but not always); and,
A general set of posts around humour, quotes, recipes, and a catch-all around “ideas” (often involving principles and current news items).

The second group of blog entries is over on my other site (polywogg.ca), although at the time of writing, it isn’t really properly formatted and set up yet. For these ones, the groupings are not quite as defined yet either, but they are my more professional topics as a writer:

Of course, there is my main theme around Human Resources, and more specifically, my HR guide to federal competitions for jobs…I’ve considered even making this a theme for another single purpose site, but I don’t need to do that yet, and I’ve included the proceedings from an HR conference I helped organize with some friends from university;
Key insights that I can write about, since I can’t write about some aspects of my work life, are around the role of the civil service, governance, and international development;
I like writing reviews, and people seem to value them on Amazon and elsewhere, so I wanted to collect my book reviews all in one spot, along with musings on reading in general, and eventually expanding so that all my movie reviews, music reviews, and regular TV reviews are together too;
I read voraciously at times about the world of publishing, and I have some views I want to share regarding publishing, marketing, pricing, and even the role of libraries in society; and,
Finally, what probably pulls all of this theme together, I want a place to post some of my own writing — shortstories, maybe some novel excerpts, some non-fiction guides, etc.

The funny thing is that deciding all of that still left me with a major choice.

A choice of branding

Which site would be “PolyWogg” and which site would be “ThePolyBlog”? Technically, they are both PolyWogg, as they are both my musings, just on different topics. And I could certainly tell myself that if the first site had entries about my personal life and family, and I’m “PolyWogg”, it made sense that PolyWogg would be the one that was more personal.

Yet ThePolyBlog is a far more informal title than PolyWogg, and if I used the personal for PolyWogg, and put the HR stuff on ThePolyBlog, well, the guide isn’t really blog entries. Plus it would then make sense to call it “ThePolyBlog’s guide to …”, and that doesn’t sound right to me at all.

In the end it doesn’t matter of course, or at least not to any one but me, but it would be a major pain in the patootie to change it around later, so I wanted to try and get it right the first (well, actually the SECOND) time.

In the end, my wife cast the deciding vote. She felt that ThePolyBlog was more informal too, and PolyWogg did seem to be more about my writing normally. So the Blog title goes to the personal informal stuff (site 1 above) and PolyWogg goes to slightly more formal “public writing” (site 2 above).

I have to confess, I was a bit surprised by how easy everything divided up once the decision was made.

Making the move

Of course, making the move was more complicated than saying “site 1 is this”, “site 2 is that”. It was all on a GreenGeeks platform under PolyWogg.ca. I needed all that content moved to WHC.CA, and I needed it split.

In the end, I settled on a two-step move. First and foremost, I migrated EVERYTHING to ThePolyBlog temporarily. WordPress has some tools that help you move everything from one place to another, including the install, but since I couldn’t be sure the GreenGeeks site wasn’t all screwed up from the myriad of changes, I decided I would do a fresh install and just move the content. I had hoped to have both PolyWogg sites (old and new) running simultaneously and bop back and forth from one to the other while the new remained in sandbox mode, but that didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped (I would have had to play constantly with my HOSTS file, too much trouble).

So I did OLD POLYWOGG and NEW THEPOLYBLOG setups, got everything all moved over, tested, all the content fine, and then I deleted the old PolyWogg site, moved to a fresh install at NEW POLYWOGG, *and* what was really cool? I then just copied the NEW POLYBLOG content over into NEW POLYWOGG and started deleting the stuff I didn’t need from each.

I even got to play with plugins as I went to make sure everything was relatively identical. In the end, my goal is that the back-end will be relatively identical, it is just the content and names that will change. “My branding” will be relatively uniform across the two, just mild differences in colours and menus, etc.

Setting up the new WordPress sites

One of my goals in setting up the new sites was to completely clean up a bunch of old plugins that I might not need anymore while streamlining certain bells and whistles too.

As a small digression, I’m often amazed by the number of people who blog, “Hey, I use this great plugin called ACME WIDGETS”. Which is great that they want to promote something they like, but it also starts giving out information to potential hackers about how your site is set up, what it is running, etc. I break this rule myself as I say I’m running WordPress, but that isn’t that big a surprise — while it doesn’t say it on my site, anyone doing a VIEW SOURCE on any page would see WordPress references pretty fast. But I don’t feel like I should make it easy for anyone to tell them things they don’t need to know, so while I will talk about plugins, I won’t talk about their names, just about the functions I’m looking for…

Obviously, one of the first decisions people make in their design is what theme to run. Lots abound, and most add functions I don’t need — sliders, magazine setups, etc. I’m a pretty vanilla guy whose posts revolve around words. A lot of words. I was using a theme that I subscribed to a long time ago, upgraded to pro, upgraded to a new version, upgraded to the pro version, now it is available in regular free mode and another pro version. The regular free mode is more than good enough for my uses. Not quite as “clean” looking as the previous one, but lower load time. It will easily meet my needs. And free is good.
The second piece people need to think about is protection. No glove, no love, and that applies to websites too. Spam protectors, firewalls, login blockers, ongoing monitors, backups, and my personal favorite? Changing the default login page so that the bots can’t even find it to try and log in. Of course, if you screw up or forget where you hid it, you can get locked out too. Oops.
My next set of tools are around beefing up the look and feel from the default theme options to add a few bells and whistles. For me, this is mostly around adding some custom widgets, some better page navigation, maybe a tool for polls and charts, and even ones around helping identify other posts that are like the current one to help encourage people to stay on your site longer.
Of course, if you don’t write anything, there’s nothing to see. So I added some basic tools for improving the writing and editing experience, adding in shortcodes to simplify certain functions, making it easy to clone or copy posts into a new post, and even controlling how quotes look/work and adjusting how many revisions to keep in the database.
One of the hottest categories in the plugin world is social media, but I keep mine pretty basic — some simple sharing links, something to help with printing, adding in some contact forms to make it easy to contact me, improving the way links are done, and just for fun, tweaking integration with major sites like Twitter and Facebook.
I added some functionality to one site to allow me to more easily facilitate downloads of some documents, but mostly I am more about the back-end — statistics, word counts, checking for broken links.
Lastly, I add a few plugins that are usually not active, but help me with certain functions you have to do from time to time like managing a database, optimizing setups, or in the case of the “big move”, duplicating and importing another WordPress site.

The agony of defeat, the thrill of victory

One of the reasons the “move” went well is that I made a painful decision a few months ago. I finally accepted that part of the frustration of the last few years with my site has been constantly trying to integrate my large photo and video gallery into the same workspace. Sure, WHC offers galleries too, and like most hosters, block video hosting (you can import links, but the files have to be stored somewhere else). In the end, I bit the bullet.

I moved my photos and videos to SmugMug. It has been the best decision I ever made. Of course, if/when SmugMug goes under, I’m screwed, but in the meantime, it is working flawlessly. Videos, pictures, all together, easily controlled, nice layout. It just works. And allowed me then to concentrate on addressing more gaps in years processed than in figuring out which plugin or theme wasn’t working. I wish I had it working well in a self-hosted site, but it was just sucking too much time to get it right. We recently had a birthday party for a 90 year old member of our family, and I put a whack of photos all up on the site, ran the app, and voila, instant slide show for the party. Worked great.

For the first time in several years of trying, I feel like I’m organized for processing photos.

However, with the pain of the move, and the thrill of it working, I then moved into the renewed pain of fixing my WordPress site for photos. I know what you’re thinking, “Wait, you put everything on SmugMug, didn’t you?”. Of course, I did.

But some of my blogs LINK to those photos and use them in posts. This means all the old links for any photo in my OLD SITE which pointed to a page on my self-hosted site now point to dead links — I had to re-add all my photos back into my blog entries.

Mostly these were entries where, for example, I talked about my honeymoon, and what I was putting in the blog were samples of the things we saw as we went. Almost like a trip blog with pics added. I tried a couple of plugins that were designed to make it easier to link, but it wasn’t required. After testing several methods, I realized that the link available on SmugMug integrated seamlessly into WordPress just by pasting a certain form of the link. It was almost instantaneously PERFECT. Really happy with it. What I thought would take possibly weeks to fix was all done in a couple of hours, and not very strenuous either — most of that time was re-reading the original blog!

Where am I now?

This site is basically done for layout and configuration. Which is why I’m blogging again. I didn’t bother blogging on the old site since back in May, partly as I didn’t know if I was going to be able to keep the content. Now that I’m up and running again, I’d like to get the word count on this site up to the 250K mark this year. Particularly now that I’ve fixed a small formatting glitch as two conflicting plugins tried to format the same text. Bye-bye to one plugin.

Now, on to fixing ThePolyBlog, a bit more challenging for some of the plugin tweaks.

Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things

August 17 2016

If you have read any of the earlier blog entries about my site (Version 2.0 of my website…, Version 2.1 of my website…, Version 2.2 (alpha) of my website…, Version 2.3 of my we b site…), you’ll know that I struggle with some of the features on the sites from time to time. Tweaking this, tweaking that.

Often it is because one feature of the site works REALLY well, and draws me in a certain direction, only to later have that feature either be less important relative to other features, or just stop working well. Sometimes it is an issue with the hosting company.

I didn’t do separate blog entries for version 3.0 where I basically had WordPress all up and running, or version 3.1 where it was a combination of two WordPress sites, one Piwigo subsite for photos and videos, or even version 3.2 where I merged it into 1 WP site and one photo subsite. Things were working pretty well, and I had transitioned over time from Spelunking Web Design (too little bandwidth and storage) to Netfirms (solid for a while until I ran into some config issues with storage) to Greengeeks (which let me host all my pix and integrated well with Google Storage for video). Usually when I have transitioned from one site to another, it has been either my needs outgrowing the basic offerings or the costs associated with my needs being much cheaper elsewhere. Each hoster has slightly different rules and offerings, and as my needs changed, I switched to keep costs down on what are basically personal sites with no commercial value.

This past year though, going back to February, I’ve had a small battle with Greengeeks. Things were going along mostly fine, after I had switched to them last fall (Cutting the cord – Part 5 – Internet hosting). Then, suddenly, things weren’t fine.

The beginning of the end of a relationship

I had consolidated my previous two WordPress sites — polywogg.ca and thepolyblog.ca — into a single site (polywogg.ca and redirected thepolyblog there too), and with the previous focus of what the two sites were about, I was able to more cleanly integrate them. It just made sense at the time for me to have everything together, no need to separate out “personal” from more “professional” musings, and separate menu options to help keep things sorted.

But then I noticed a problem in February with something rather small initially. I was running a “to do” list app on the site…well, actually three of them. One for work, one for personal, one for “other”. Plus a calendar that my wife and I could share. Like with hosting my photos on the site, it seemed to me that if I had a whole site to myself, why would I use other sites, commercial or otherwise, to host my info?

One day I went to do something on the to-do list and the subsite wouldn’t load. Dead. Fatal errors out the wazoo. This was odd, it had been working the week before just fine. Two other lists were also “dead”. And the calendar. WordPress loaded fine, but the look was a bit off. I checked the photo site and it too was acting weird for layout. Connected to the help desk, asked a few questions, and they located the problem almost immediately. They had auto-upgraded my site from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

If you’re a layperson, you might think, “Sweet! Free upgrade!”. If you’re a little more knowledgeable about sites, you might think, “They upgraded you automatically?”. And if you’re way more hardcore than me, you likely are thinking, “WTF??? Why would they upgrade you automatically? Did they tell you so you could test your config? What kind of hoster would change your site without warning, notice or testing?”. Guess which camp I fell into.

The upgrade broke my todo list installs and the calendar as they weren’t 7.0 compatible. WP’s core is 7.0 compatible, but all the plugins apparently were not. Hard to tell, precisely, but WP was a bit off. PiwigoPress, that I was using for my photos, also didn’t completely like the upgrade tweak in the background, but I’ll come back to that.

They switched me back to 5.6, lists seemed fine, calendar loaded, everything else worked, it seemed like “no harm, no foul”. At first. Then about a week later, I started noticing my photos didn’t seem to load properly. The layout screen for a gallery, for example, would load, but not all the photos. Some were just placeholder symbols in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge. Definitely a server issue if all three were treating it the same. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes everything would load fine. Home seemed fine, work seemed more intermittent. Then I tried it on my tablet, worked great. Decided it was a temporary bandwidth issue, moved on.

Then I uploaded a batch of new photos, and all hell broke loose on my site. Pics wouldn’t render at all, any format, any location, any connection. It just did NOT want to load right at all. Then some would, others never. I tweaked, I checked, I tweaked, I checked. No idea what was wrong. I hadn’t changed anything in almost two months, but now, suddenly nothing worked? I went back to Greengeeks support to see if anything else had happened? Nope.

The larger investigation begins

I thought it might be the PHP version, as they were going to phase out lower support. So I transitioned all my lists to a new app/site temporarily and then from there more recently to one called TickTick. Accessible from work, comes with app, updates in real-time reliably between Andrea’s phone and mine (we share shopping lists for groceries, for example, so she can make the list and I can buy the stuff), good toggle options to switch things on and off. I moved our calendar to Sunrise, which then was closing shop, and now to Google, since we can both run reliable apps to synch. So I was down to just WP and Piwigo, and they seem to like 7.0 reasonably fine.

Yet wonkiness remained. Over time, I narrowed a feature down that wasn’t working in Piwigo. Photo conversion wasn’t working right. It didn’t seem to be adjusting the size, and the rendering was taking forever.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the switching from 5.6 to 7.0, and then back, was not a simple switch. The switchback was actually a complete reset of some sort. Features in PHP setup that had been “on”, like one called GDIMAGE and another like IMAGEMAGICK, were now switched off by default. Now that is not something I would ever play with — once I get the initial setup right, there would be no reason for me to go into that extremely technical side of the configuration. It’s almost like going in and editing the Registry in Windows. You *might* have to do it for something specific, but rarely manually. And I found the default change by accident.

Why would they matter? GDIMAGE and IMAGEMAGICK are library functions for PHP (not quite the right term, but close enough) that add image conversion to the list of things PHP can do. Such as enabling Piwigo — I uploaded photos in one size, and it would convert them to other sizes so you have the thumbnail for small viewing on one type of layout, medium for another, large for a third, and then the full image (if you tell it to keep it, which I did). I had unlimited storage, and having those different sizes is supposed to make everything load better/quicker without having to do resizing on the fly.

But with them off, Piwigo wasn’t working right. It was trying, but I configured and reconfigured things out the wazoo before I found the missing libraries problem. Then I tried to put everything back to the way it had been, but things still weren’t quite right.

I started getting warnings that the server load was too high. Too high? How could that be? I had a WP site that had double-digit visitors on a good day, another that had visitors once or twice a year that I host for someone else, and a photo site that might have visitors once a month. No way could I be overloading the server. Yet the logs didn’t lie. 10K hits in a single day, most asking for pages that didn’t exist, lots of redirects, some attempts to log in. Spam attack in some ways, access attacks in others, and just a lot of pic loading. Sort of. Some of it was just Piwigo still struggling with the load to convert graphics sizes.

Greengeeks and I started a series of exchanges as we tried to nail down the problem. They, like any bad hoster, start with the premise that it’s all the user’s fault and that they didn’t do nuttin. Except they had. The original PHP switcheroo. Then, on a regular basis, they would try to help, and they would tweak a setting they thought would help. Except they would do it without telling me. I would be in the middle of testing multiple configs, resetting things, and suddenly one of my changes looked WRONG. Something that shouldn’t have caused that change. I’d undo it but the change would remain.

And I would go down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours or even days trying to figure out WHY that changed with my changes, only to find out it wasn’t my change. It was them changing background settings in the middle of my testing and not telling me. Meaning I would have to go back to the beginning and start the testing all over.

I was getting increasingly hostile about their support. Particularly after they swore it was PiwigoPress causing the problems. I finally gave access to one of the actual developers to check the config directly, something I was floored he was willing to do. I had been all over the Piwigo forums trying to find a possible cause, and then he offered to check since none of the things I was looking for should have been the problem. Everything was set properly. No issues. And Piwigo is being run on literally hundreds of thousands of installs without issue. The problem was NOT Piwigo.

I finally started to figure out what had happened. This is a bit simplistic and misleading description, but basically it was a combination of several features. WordPress liked PHP 7.0 but a security plugin within WordPress did not. Sort of. It basically changed the way it handled sub-directories — since my WP install was at the equivalent of WWW.SITE.CA, and my Piwigo was in WWW.SITE.CA/PHOTOS, the WP security plugin was trying to control the photos site too. It wasn’t designed to do that, but it wasn’t expecting virtual subdomains to be located below the main root. At least as far as I can tell. Equally, the PHP 5.6 to 7.0 to 5.6 switcheroos turned off my image processors, which sent Piwigo into a tizzy. Between the two, i.e. the image processing and the overly active security plugin, I was really struggling to find the source of the reconfiguration issue.

Adding in multiple changes without Greengeeks telling me they changed something, the problem was impossible. I couldn’t be sure my “testing” was working, and frequently it wasn’t — cuz they changed something in the middle of my efforts.

Ratcheting up to a governance issue

This seems like an odd way to describe it, but I was now dealing with a governance issue. I explicitly told them they could do diagnostics if they were helping, and identify things I might look at, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they to make any further changes to my actual setup. They did anyway.

So I opened a ticket of complaint. Someone deleted it. Literally, it disappeared out of the tracking system. I opened two new ones — one with the same info and one to find out what happened to my original ticket. Both were deleted.

At this point, the relationship was basically toast, but I’ve paid for three years worth of hosting to get the lowest price, and while I’m willing to eat that cost (decided that upfront when I paid it), I wasn’t willing to go gently into the night. I tweeted a couple of their major customers who provided testimonials on the “greatness” that was Greengeeks, I tweeted their CEO, I tweeted their IT specialist. Suddenly people started paying attention to my tickets.

I didn’t get any better service, but they were at least paying attention. Now, separate from the pain and frustration, many of you might jump to the obvious two solutions:

Kill the account, move on;
Delete everything, reinstall from scratch.

I was hoping for (2) still, but there’s a small problem with that plan. I had no way of knowing that if I got it all working and installed right, another change from GG wouldn’t come along and swamp my setup. So I wanted to know how to mitigate that risk. I started asking a series of Qs of the tech group that I wanted answered sequentially so I could get to the point where I would say, “Okay, if I blow off WordPress, and reinstall, AND I blow off Piwigo and reinstall, how do we do this in the least painful way possible?”.

Backups were fine for WP as I could “reload” the database options i.e. import all the content again. However, Piwigo was now so corrupted in the install that I had no confidence the backups wouldn’t produce the same result — I needed a brand-new fresh install. And reuploading of 7000 photos! With descriptions re-added for albums, etc. Now, I have a good setup for sorting pics at home, it was easy to reupload, and I could have done a DL and new UL of the existing structure, but I figured going nuclear on my install would be easier.

About this time though I realized that I no longer trusted the host. I had transcripts from the same guy, the one I complained about, where it said “A”, then “not A”, then “A”, then “not A”, then “A” and finally “A because you told me it was A”. The guy was a lying sack of excrement. And I still had no accountability response from GG to say how the guy was allowed to delete my complaints in the system, nor were my outstanding issues addressed.

It was time to break up

I started shopping for a new host. I talked to a few, explained some of my problems / frustrations, told them what I needed, and what I was willing to spend. I zeroed in on WebHostingCanada, partly as when I asked some technical questions, they jumped immediately to the problems it took me 3 months to solve on my own. The guy told me up front that one of their cheaper options wouldn’t be enough as the hosting industry didn’t always truly tell the right stats on certain things, essentially telling me that while it says “x”, it’s partly throttled (which isn’t advertised). The exact problem I seemed to be having with GG and which 3 months of testing had revealed but they wouldn’t admit. He even made me laugh at one point…I told him the specs for something technical in my current setup and he said, “Oh, that’s so sad” i.e. that the setup was so limited.

The transition didn’t go completely smoothly, but it did “go”. But that’s the basis for another post.

In terms of Greengeeks, I left my hosting account active for the remaining 2 years — I’m hosting another site through there, bare minimal load, and if their server has problems, it won’t affect me. At the end of the two years, I’ll transition to a site I already have.

While I’m now on my fourth hoster in 18 years, and my third one in 3, I’ve made some other config issues which should help. And I’m still paying less than I was previously, and getting more power. I can (hopefully) live with that.

The PolyBlog

My view from the lilypads

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