Tag Archives: design

So you want your own website…

The PolyBlog
December 4 2018

Since a lot of friends know I have my own website, it isn’t uncommon to get questions about how they get their own website, dipping their toe in the vast sea of having their own presence online. Usually I frame the discussion around three questions.

A. Do you want your own domain?

This is almost always a no-brainer for people as they often think in very specific terms and have some domain names in mind. My domain, polywogg.ca, is registered to me and only me. It is the same for every company on the planet that has a site, usually. They all register a domain name that is unique to them.

It isn’t the only way to go. Lots of people use free sites at various hosters and end up with sites like “http://AndreasWorld.wordpress.com” or “LoveOfBooks.blogger.com”. Their “unique” presence is still there but the hoster’s name shows up too. For some, they don’t care about that; for most, they do.

If you care about having a site that only has your name in it, you need to register a domain. If you don’t, you can go with lots of hosters that will give you an address like above. Or even trick out a bunch of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Now, the REAL question is more difficult, and for me it’s not a question. I do not and will not register a domain with the same company I choose for my hosting of the site. Let me explain.

When I put my website online, I need two things:

a. A registrar who tells the internet that polywogg.ca is registered to me and also tells all its internet friends where to find my website (the technical numerical address of my site); AND

b. A server of some sort that hosts the files and content for my actual website.

A registrar and a hoster. I need both. And lots of people who are hosters will also offer registrar services. And some registrars have also gotten into hosting. A fully-integrated service, as they pitch it.

Yet there is an inherent conflict of interest for them. Sure, they have to do it all properly and everything, but when you register your domain, it actually records four pieces of information — a registrant ID, a tech ID, an admin ID, and the DOMAIN NAME SERVICE (DNS) address where your website can be founded (like your REAL IP web address that the internet servers use, not the word form users see).

For most people registering a personal site, the DNS will be given to you by your hoster; the admin ID is likely you; and the tech ID may be whoever is helping you set up the website or just you. Regardless of who is doing the registry, these three things are pretty much the same across the board. The problem comes with the REGISTRANT ID.

This basically says who owns that domain. When you do the registry yourself, it should always say you. However, here’s the kicker…sometimes companies that offer cheap registries and hosting packages actually find it easier to just register themselves in that field. They may also register themselves as the tech or admin ID, which is not ideal, but not too problematic, they’re easily changed. But the owner / registrant ID requires the registered ID holder to agree to any changes.

Most people don’t think anything about this. And if you ask the hoster, they’ll tell you there’s no issue. You just move the registry to somewhere else. But unless you have that in writing, why would you simply trust them?

There are countless stories on the web of BADHOSTER X registering a domain “on behalf of” customer Y. Fast forward five years, the person’s needs have changed in what they’re looking for in a website, and they see lovely HOSTER Z sitting over there with exactly what they’re looking for at the right price. No problem, Y will just move from X to Z. And then X says, “Whoa, wait a minute. We want your business. Let us do blah blah blah.” And so they delay and cajole the person into staying. And eventually it turns acrimonious as the person just wants to leave, and BADHOSTER X won’t relinquish their ownership of the domain. They’ll let the DNS address point to another service, but they won’t do it quickly (they serve their own customers first), and what a surprise, they’ll only do it after paying an admin fee. If you’re Mr. or Ms. Big and Popular site, sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, look at our sliding scale…we’ve been discounting, so now you have to pay our full admin fee based on usage, and oh look, they want $1000 to transfer your domain.” It’s extortion, pure and simple, and yes, it is indeed illegal.

Is this a frequent problem? No. Is it a possible problem? Absolutely. They also might just jack the rates after year 1 for your renewals (you have to pay a yearly fee to keep the domain registered to you).

When I went to register my domain, all the experts said “do it separately”, it’s just less risk of future hassle, and while a bit more manual, not egregiously so. And I did. I found Canadian Domain Name Services in Canada, registered all three of my domain names with them over time, and that’s the only service I do with them. They now offer hosting too, but I don’t need that. I just need the basic service I signed up with them for, and it works perfectly. No muss, no fuss, no extortionary practices if I decide to move my website hosting. Which, by the way, I have done four times in my website’s life. Just deciding that the previous hosting wasn’t what I wanted. Three clicks later (almost), and I was with someone else’s hosting package, so I just closed the previous one. And if any of the hosters gave me a hard time, I didn’t care — I just went to the registrar and pointed away from that hoster to my new hoster, leaving me with an up and running site. By contrast, if I was in dispute with my old hoster, they could literally hold me and my website hostage if they were also my registrar.

And yes, ALL the current hosters will offer you deals on your initial registry to get you to join, and almost ALL of them will register themselves as the owner of the domain. You decide if you want to trust them with that part of your site.

In the end, the question is easily answered by a simple metaphor…if you paid a lawyer to register your business, would you let them register themselves as the owner?

B. Do you want a dynamic site or a static site?

If you read any web design advice on the web, they’ll tell you that static sites are the worst possible thing to do. But they mean something different than what this question means.

What they mean is that sites need updates and new content in order to generate buzz and traffic. New things to encourage people to visit your site regularly. What they mean is “dynamic content”.

In my case though, I mean two things — is there going to be dynamic content (as per above) and are you going to want to change the look and feel, menus, etc. on the site over time?

If all you want is a relatively static site — both for content and design — then there are lots of simple hosters out there that offer HTML-based websites (simple web pages) with slick looking templates. You go to their site, sign up for a hosting package, choose a template, and voila, your site is designed. You add your info, some pics and graphics, and you’re done. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

GoDaddy used to be the biggest player on the block for this. Then companies like WIX came along. They’re cheap, they’re slick, it all works pretty well. The only thing you’ll have to do is provide your credit card, click some buttons, and then go tell your registry whatever info the hoster tells you to enter (it’ll basically be something like “Your DNS entry is AndreasWorld.wix1.com” and you’ll go enter that in the registrar site — it’s basically like telling the post office where you live).

There are GREAT sites and templates available. Prices can be as low as $5/month or even lower if you pay by the year. So why wouldn’t everyone use it? Because it isn’t easy to modify the template. If you decide you don’t like the colour of the lines on a table? Well, good luck changing it. Maybe it’s easy, likely it’s not. Some features aren’t even available to be edited, regardless of your technical ability, unless you’re a pro.

Cheap, easy, fast, and relatively professional looking. But it’s not easy to update regularly (nor change the design).

Others, by contrast, want to basically add new content every day. A story. A photo. A post. A new page. Random thoughts. If this is what you are after OR you will be mostly static but with lots of sub-pages, then another solution is better. Officially it’s called a CMS — content management system.

The most common CMS available are blogging platforms aka blogs or gallery platforms aka photo galleries. If you’ll be mostly posting text, you want a blogger; if you are mostly posting photos, you might want a gallery. And of course, just to be confusing, most galleries allow you to have blog-like posts and most blogs also offer galleries. But if you’re mostly text, go with the blog.

There are two main blogging platforms that are like Wix or GoDaddy — already available blogging setups ready to go. One is called blogger.com, and the other is WordPress. Blogger is entirely a self-contained site, you can host your site with them (with your own domain, just like Wiz) and have a bunch of templates to choose from. Click, click, click, you’re good to go. A little basic in their offerings, but you can be blogging in minutes. Literally.

WordPress took a different approach. Yes, they offer both free and paid online accounts (as does Blogger), and the more you pay, the more power you have. Even the most basic site though is more powerful than the free site (and you can have your own domain as opposed to polywogg.wordpress.com). Like Blogger, you can be up and running in minutes, but there is more power under the hood, so it can be a bit more daunting.

The alternative approach they took though is that they ALSO offer their software as a full download and you can run it on other hosting platforms i.e. I am registered with a company called Web Hosting Canada, and can install WordPress to run on it. There are competitors out there too — Moodle, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Actually dozens, if not hundreds. But WordPress is the biggest player.

Running your own “install” of WordPress might sound daunting, and it is at first. But there aren’t that many menus under the hood, and they are relatively intuitive after you finish with setup. Plus there are thousands of templates available to tweak to your heart’s content.

Definitely more work, but the payoff is that a blog is inherently dynamic. Write a new article, post it, and BAM, instant dynamic content. If you don’t plan to do that, then stick with a static site.

C. What else do you want on the site?

After you get through the basics of a static or dynamic page above, you should be leaning one way or the other. Now I need to make your life more complicated. What else do you want on the site?

Do you want a guestbook? If you do, it is easier to do and control with a dynamic site (after all, static sites don’t inherently let you make simple updates like adding your name to the page).

Do you want a catalog of products that might change? If it’s a few services or products and they are relatively the same all the time, maybe just price changes, you can go with a static site. If you want a lot of products listed (almost like a gallery), you need a dynamic site.

Do you want sidebars, banners, advertising, changing menus, galleries, calendars? All argue for a dynamic site. The more “custom” you need it, the less the basic static sites are going to meet your needs.

What am I not telling you?

If you are going to hire someone to do the design for you, none of the above may matter. If they are good, they’ll set you up with a solution that meets your needs today and tomorrow. Of course, there may be a small conflict of interest in their advice in that they may get more money out of you if you redesign later.

So, in short:

  • Simple site, not much change in content, few pages, basic web presence — go with static site;
  • Changing content, multiple pages, regular updates, evergreen web presence — go with dynamic site like WordPress.

At least those are the basics.

Version 4.0 of my website

The PolyBlog
July 2 2017

In my last post about the server side of my website (Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things and Version 3.3 of my websites: the software side), I talked about a problem I was having with GreenGeeks that they couldn’t solve. It was a lot more complicated than just one problem, or even their laissez-faire approach to changing settings on my site without telling me, it was more of a governance issue and I finally had to bail on them. I’m still using them for one site that has low traffic, just until the prepaid balance is used up, and then I’ll migrate it over to my new host.

Because I did indeed find a new host, as I said…I moved to WebHostingCanada. And things were going along pretty well with them.

I had an error at one point, one that I haven’t resolved yet, where my WP-CRON (the file that regularly runs a set command at a set time) doesn’t want to post “scheduled” posts. So, for example, if I write a post, and I want it to go live at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, you use the schedule feature in WordPress and at 8:00 a.m., or shortly thereafter when WP-CRON runs, it notices a pending post, and switches it to live. Or it is supposed to. For some reason, while some of the Cron features work for other things, it won’t “schedules” my posts to go live and actually make them live at that time (it schedules them, it just doesn’t do it). Like an alarm clock that just doesn’t go off when it should.

Not a giant issue, I rarely schedule posts that way, and when I do, it’s often part of a larger strategy that requires manual intervention anyway.

Then I upgraded to a new version of WordPress. Then another. All good.

Then I went up to a version where suddenly I couldn’t save my updates. It was like the auto-save would start as I was typing, and never complete. So when I went to later save, it wasn’t able to “activate” when I pressed “update”. Other people were having this too, with nobody seeming to have a solution.

Now, the normal way to resolve this is to go to your plugins and deactivate everything. Check again — if it works, then you have a plugin conflict; if it doesn’t, it likely means it is something else (* remember this asterisk). You then move along to themes, switch to a basic theme, see if the conflict goes away. Etc. It helps you narrow down to what is wrong. If you disable your theme and your plugins and your connections to just about everything, it might be a server problem, something wrong with your config.

Which is where I was looking for solutions. Because disabling my plugins and theme didn’t resolve the problem. But my server settings all looked fine.

Except for one small glitch. My server load was high. Now I had this before with Greengeeks when running Piwigo and WordPress, and they thought it was some sort of outside attack. Webhosting said “nope, not that”, this looked more like a config problem to them. So I got a phone call from them noting it was really high and asking if they could log in and check a few things. They weren’t spammers, they didn’t need my credentials, they just wanted permission before they started poking around.

I was like, “hell, yeah”. Greengeeks went in, poked around and changed things, without asking or even telling me. Here Webhosting Canada was, phoning me in person to ask if they could look around my setup and see if there was anything going on. I walked the guy through the background, stuff I’d tried in the past, and off he went. I wished him luck, as this could have been a rabbit hole.

He found the problem in less than 3 minutes. As soon as he saw one of the security files set up by Better WP Security, it was clear what the problem was. The file was HUGE, and it was calling itself. So every time I logged in or even loaded a page, it would go into an almost perpetual loop of constantly checking and then rechecking and then rechecking itself again. He tweaked the file, disabled the plugin, and the load dropped to normal. It was just that one plugin.

Now, back to that asterisk. Disabling the plugin hadn’t helped. Because disabling it didn’t undo the security file changes. The plugin wasn’t active, but the huge file was still being triggered. Undoing those changes and making the changes relatively straightforwardly with another security plugin to do the same thing worked PERFECT.

And my editing / saving problem went away too.

Their totally different attitude to solving the problem made all the difference for me. And while diagnosing WP problems is not their job, that’s a config problem, they did it at no charge.

I feel somewhat unfair now about the previous hosts. They had the same issue but no idea how to solve it, and all evidence was pointing to a server problem, not a software config problem. But the guy found it in under 3 minutes once he stepped outside the normal “not my problem” box that most tech supports have. Back when I was working tech supports, it was the same “not my problem” attitude of others that drove me batty. And my alternate “let’s see if I can help with anything else while I’m here” attitude is what made me popular with my clients.

Thumbs up to WebHosting Canada. The site’s working great. WP-CRON is still acting up, but I can live with that for now. And it gave me the confidence to merge the two sites into one (#50by50 #02 – Who am I when I’m online?). I also reconfigured the categories and groupings into Government (Civil Service, Development, Government), Hobbies (Astronomy, Computers, Humour, Ideas, Learning, Photography, Quotes, and Recipes), HR (HR Guide and PS Transitions FP), Personal (Experiences, Family, Goals, 50by50, Spiritualism), Reviews (Book Reviews, Music Reviews, TV reviews), Writing (Libraries, Publishing, Art of Writing) and Links.

I’ve also decided to be a little less demanding re: the “one category per post” rule that I’ve been doing, it’s hard to find things sometimes where I’m talking about a goal that pertains to one of the headings, for example — is it a post about goals or a post about the hobby?

I’m liking the new design, and trying to be a bit more flexible.

Looking for data visualization tools in all the wrong places…

The PolyBlog
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

The PolyBlog
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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

The PolyBlog
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:

  1. Posts about family or just daily experiences…the truly personal side of my life;
  2. In the same vein, but a little less “directly personal”, some of my approach to life like goal-setting, learning including photography, and spiritualism;
  3. 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,
  4. 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:

  1. 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;
  2. 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;
  3. 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;
  4. 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,
  5. 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…

  1. 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.
  2. 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. 
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.