Perishable Press

Improve Site Performance by Increasing PHP Memory for WordPress

During the recent ASO server debacle, I raced frantically to restore functionality to Perishable Press. Along the way, one of the many tricks that I tried while trying to fix the dreaded “white screen of death” syndrome involved increasing the amount of PHP memory available to WordPress. This fix worked for me, but may not prove effective ...

Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database

Recently, while dealing with the dreaded white screen of death, I found myself unable to login to the WordPress Admin area to manually disable all of the plugins used here at Perishable Press. In the past, I have dealt with this situation by simply deleting all plugin files from the server, however this time, time was of the essence — I had only a few minutes with which to troubleshoot, diagnose, ...

Perishable Press Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.3

Just a note to announce a site upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3. The upgrade went well, but overall server performance continues to suffer. I am aware that some people are experiencing difficulties leaving comments and even accessing the site in general. Rest assured, I am working with my hosting company, A Small Orange, to get everything back on track and running smooth. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issues, restore full ...

Advanced PHP Error Handling via PHP

In my previous articles on PHP error handling, I explain the process whereby PHP error handling may be achieved using htaccess. Handling (logging, reporting) PHP errors via htaccess requires the following: Access/editing privileges for htaccess files A server running ...

Advanced PHP Error Handling via htaccess

In my previous article on logging PHP errors, How to Enable PHP Error Logging via htaccess, we observed three fundamental aspects of preventing, preserving, and protecting your site’s PHP errors: Prevent public display of PHP errors via htaccess # supress php errors php_flag display_startup_errors off php_flag display_errors off php_flag html_errors off php_value docref_root 0 php_value docref_ext 0 Preserve (log) ...

Yahoo! Slurp in My Blackhole (Yet Again)

Yup, ‘ol Slurp is at it again, flagrantly disobeying specific robots.txt rules forbidding access to my bad-bot trap, lovingly dubbed the “blackhole.” As many readers know, this is not the first time Yahoo has been caught behaving badly. This time, Yahoo was caught trespassing five different times via three different IPs over the course of four different days. Here is the data recorded ...

More Server Mayhem

Just when I thought I had finally solved my web-hosting woes by transferring to a virtual private server, I am slapped in the face by the cold realities of server memory limitations. Apparently, WordPress-powered sites are extremely resource-intensive, requiring insane amounts of random access memory (RAM), something which does not concern those of us working from shared hosting accounts. On a shared server, system resources are shared among the ...

A Dramatic Week Here at Perishable Press..

..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights.. The tide may be turning ...

What’s Up Dude

Hello! If you are seeing this page via the default WordPress theme (i.e., blue header, based on Kubrick), welcome to the new server! I recently upgraded my hosting to a virtual private server, and finally reassigned the domain name servers to resolve to the new address. So, if you are here and everything seems to be working, then everything went according to plan and I will be able to complete the transfer on Saturday (Lord willing). If, ...

Site News: Bad Behavior Spasm, Switching to New VPS Server..

Hello! As many of you already know, the popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, caused some problems yesterday, and as a result many bloggers and users were locked out of their favorite sites, including this one. As for now, the problem seems to be fixed, however, the experience of being locked out of my own site has left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth. Needless to say, I will be reconsidering the continued use of Bad Behavior ...

Yahoo! in my Blackhole

Okay, I realize that the title sounds a bit odd, but nowhere near as odd as my recent discovery of Slurp ignoring explicit robots.txt rules and digging around in my highly specialized bot trap, which I have lovingly dubbed “the blackhole”. What is up with that, Yahoo!? — does your Slurp spider obey robots.txt directives or not? I have never seen Google crawling around that side of town, neither has MSN nor even Ask ventured into the ...

News from the Frontline..

My apologies for recent periods of site unavailability. Apparently, my hosting company is having a difficult time with the server that happens to host Perishable Press. As far as I can tell, the server problems began Wednesday morning (due to a “traffic spike”). By Thursday morning, Perishable Press (as well as a few of my other sites) had been down for a period exceeding eight nonconsecutive hours. According to my log files, Thursday itself was even worse, ...

Eliminate 404 Errors for PHP Functions

Recently, I discussed the suspicious behavior recently observed by the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. As revealed by the site’s closely watched 404-error logs, Yahoo! had been requesting a series of nonexistent resources. Although a majority of the 404 errors were exclusive to the Slurp crawler, there were several instances of requests that were also coming from Google, Live, and even Ask. Initially, these distinct errors were misdiagnosed as existing ...

Suspicious Behavior from Yahoo! Slurp Crawler

[ Keywords: yahoo, slurp, crawl, crawling, spider, url, 404, errors, suspicious, behavior ] Most of the time, when I catch scumbags attempting to spam, scrape, leech, or otherwise hack my site, I stitch up a new voodoo doll and let the cursing begin. No, seriously, I just blacklist the idiots. I don’t ...

Web Host Recommendation: A Small Orange Delivers Superior Service

[ Keywords: shared, hosting, small, orange, asmallorange, aso, cpanel, whm, server, host, excellent ] Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:   Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth Unlimited Email ...

Compressed JavaScript Compression

[ Keywords: javascript, compression, compress, php, htaccess, gzip, ob_gzhandler ] In this article, we extrapolate our favorite CSS-compression technique for JavaScript. Below, we outline the steps required to auto-compress your JavaScript documents via gzip and PHP. Two different compression methods are presented. The first method does not require htaccess, but rather involves the manual editing of JavaScript files. The second method employs htaccess to do ...

Even More Server Drama

Several months ago, we encountered some problems with our hosting company and decided to switch servers. Then, after spending countless hours transferring our army of domains, the new server crashed and our databases were deleted. Further, after the transfer we quickly realized the inferior technological quality of our new host. Thus disgusted, we transferred everything back to our old server and hoped for the ...

Website Attack Recovery

Recently, every website on our primary server was simultaneously attacked. The offending party indiscriminately replaced the contents of every index file, regardless of its extension or location, with a few vulgar lines of code, which indicated intention, identity, and influence. Apparently, the attack occurred via Germany, through a server at the University of Hamburg. This relatively minor attack resulted in several hours of valuable online education. In this article, it is our intention ...

Have Peace of Mind

Looking for the perfect dedicated server? Well, “Don’t Just a Dedicated Server!” — “Have Peace of Mind!” with Daily Razor Hosting. Have a Peace of Mind

Migration and Propagation Business

The overly dramatic process of transferring our Online Empire to a new server and then back again manifests several valuable lessons. Please look back your note and observe the following suggestions during any future server migration and/or domain propagation events... Domain Propagation When switching servers, do not cancel the old account until absolutely positive it is no longer needed. Edit all Domain Name Servers (DNS) with the new server Internet Protocols (IP’s) as soon as ...

More Server Drama

After successfully migrating our domains to a new server at WebHostingBuzz.com, we continued writing articles, uploading, embellishing, and fine-tuning everything. Everything seemed fine. At first... After about three days it became painfully obvious that we had it better on our previous server. For example, running PHP 4.2-something with several important database features disabled. Plus, the new servers didn’t seem quite as fast, WordPress XML feeds ...

Perishable Press Server Migration

As you may have read, we recently transferred our websites to a new server. Although the overall process went smoothly enough, several learning opportunities unfolded during the transfer of our humble Perishable Press website... First, the setup. Perishable Press is a WordPress-powered website. On our previous server, we were running a Fantastico-installed WordPress version 2.0.2, upgraded from version 2.0. Permalinks were enabled and everything was running smoothly. ...

Server Migration Details

About a year ago we signed up with a hosting provider that offered one of the best hosting deals around: lots of space, bandwidth, and transfer — plus all of the usual server software amenities that make life easier. Everything went smoothly at first... In fact, the first six months of service were close to 100%. The few help-ticket items submitted were promptly resolved in a professional manner. We were ready to start some business and everything was ...

Server Migration Success

Praise the Lord! Perishable Press now humbly resides on a new server. Time for a little break..

HTTP Error Codes

A list of HTTP Error codes and corresponding definitions: Informational Codes 100 -- Continue 101 -- Switching Protocols Successful Client Requests 200 -- OK 201 -- Created 202 -- Accepted 203 -- Non-Authorative Information 204 -- No Content 205 -- Reset Content 206 -- Partial Content Client Request Redirected 300 -- Multiple Choices 301 -- Moved Permanently 302 -- Moved Temporarily 303 -- See Other 304 -- Not Modified 305 -- Use Proxy 307 -- Temporary Redirect Client Request Errors 400 -- Bad Request 401 -- Authorization Required 402 -- Payment Required (not used yet) 403 -- Forbidden...

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Tools & Resources

3G Blacklist finally unleashed!