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Blank Pages After WP Upgrades

I was upgrad­ing the Word­Press site for someone and had a few moments of panic when, after upgrad­ing, all I could see were blank pages. Vis­ions of hav­ing to go through the pain of rein­stalling the data­base from the backup, and upload­ing all the files from the backup, were dan­cing through my head, which would turn a quick upgrade into a long mara­thon. The upgrade here was from 2.6.something to 3.0.1, and I hadn’t bothered doing all the inter­me­di­ate upgrades, so that made the pro­spect even worse.

Pok­ing around the vari­ous sup­port pages encour­aged me to try a couple of dif­fer­ent things first. The fact that all the pages were blank, both the admin site and the publicly-visible site, made the prob­lem seem worse than it ended up being. And the solu­tions turned out to be rel­at­ively simple.

Step 1: get the admin site going. I’d made all the plu­gins inact­ive, but fol­low­ing the advice on the WP FAQ troubleshoot­ing page, I renamed the plu­gins dir­ect­ory to plugins.hold, and cre­ated a new empty plu­gins dir­ect­ory. This worked, and I could see the admin site. It turns out that one par­tic­u­lar plu­gin cre­ated havoc even when it wasn’t activ­ated. I could then rein­stall all the needed plu­gins cleanly from the auto­matic install one at a time, test­ing to make sure each one worked.

Step 2: go to the Appear­ance page and turn on the default theme (one thing I’d for­got­ten to do before upgrad­ing). It turns out that the old theme wasn’t com­pat­ible with 3.0.1, and showed only blank pages.

Now the site works again, albeit not look­ing quite the same as it did due to the theme, but that prob­lem is tract­able and doesn’t cre­ate any­where near the same “oh, no” prob­lem that the oth­ers did.

2010 11 27 Technology
WordPress Comments (0) Permalink

Sender Settings

This took me a while to fig­ure out yes­ter­day, so in the hopes it helps someone else (or reminds me of the solu­tion when I need to solve the same prob­lem again).

The symp­tom: Mail.app on my Mac laptop is send­ing email with the wrong “From” header, even though I’ve chosen the right account to send it from, and the email in the Sent folder has the right email address in the From header.

The back­ground: my major cli­ent com­pany wants me to start using their email address for work I do for them, which seems com­pletely reas­on­able to me. For vari­ous reas­ons, how­ever, I need to keep using the Google SMTP server that I have for my Tex­tu­al­ity email to send the mail (SSL cer­ti­fic­ate stuff that I have no con­trol over being the main reason).

The solu­tion: as far as the Google SMTP server is con­cerned, you need to prove you own the email address that’s in the From header, or it will simply sub­sti­tute the email address that it does know that you own (in my case my textuality.com email address). To authen­tic­ate, and thereby allow the Google SMTP server to use the other email address as the sender email address, log in to the browser inter­face of your Google email account (whether GMail or a Google Apps account). Click on the “Set­tings” link (should be top right). Click on the “Accounts” link. In the “Send mail as:” sec­tion, click on the “Add another email address you own” link. The help inform­a­tion on this doesn’t make it clear that this sec­ond­ary email address can be any email address, served through any sys­tem. It doesn’t have to be a Google account, it just has to be an address you receive email at. You won’t be pick­ing up that email using the Google sys­tem unless you also set up some­thing in the “Get mail from other accounts:” sec­tion, which is not some­thing I wanted to do. Then, fol­low the instruc­tions. Google will send email to your sec­ond­ary address as a simple authen­tic­a­tion (veri­fic­a­tion) pro­ced­ure. Click on the link in the email, or fol­low the other instruc­tions. Then hey presto, the Google SMTP server will allow you to send your email using your sec­ond­ary email address as the “From” sender. And people reply­ing to it will send the email to the right account.

2010 10 19 Technology Comments (0) Permalink

Calendars and Sharing

The prob­lem du jour is one that I’m sure lots of people have run into, and one in which the stand­ard answer is for every­one to stand­ard­ize on one tool. Since I have this propensity for stand­ards that mean people can choose the tools they want, I don’t really like that atti­tude, even if I under­stand the “I just want to get some work done” prin­ciple behind it.

In short, I don’t use Out­look. Lots of people do, and they want me to share my cal­en­dar with them to make it easier to book meet­ings. Fair enough, in this one com­pany almost every­one uses Out­look. I use Google cal­en­dar, which can share in a num­ber of ways, and get­ting a basic ICS file from point A to point B is not an issue. What is the issue is the pri­vacy angle, or free/busy set­tings. Since I have dif­fer­ent cli­ents, and dif­fer­ent pro­jects, when I pub­lish my cal­en­dar on a site for cli­ent A, they shouldn’t see the titles of the times I have booked for cli­ent B, or for my private appoint­ments. They just want to know when I have free time, any­way. Should be easy, right? Just set the Google cal­en­dar shar­ing options to show only free/busy, down­load the .ics file that’s gen­er­ated and upload to the appro­pri­ate server, right? Wrong. Google cal­en­dar saves free/busy using the VFREEBUSY com­pon­ent. Microsoft Out­look does not import or export VFREEBUSY com­pon­ents, thus when it tries to open that .ics file it throws an error.

I guess I could install Out­look and use Google/Outlook syn­chron­isa­tion, but I also have a Mac laptop and don’t really feel like buy­ing mul­tiple cop­ies of pro­grams just to share a cal­en­dar. Next thought: maybe iCal on the Mac will pub­lish the info cor­rectly. I import the ICS file into iCal, set it to pub­lish to the web­dav server, make sure I leave off all the title and note info, only to find that what is still pub­lished is the LOCATION info, which con­tains all sorts of things like who’s call­ing whom, where the meet­ing is, etc. Thus it’s not exactly just the free/busy info I was look­ing for, des­pite what the help file says.

At this stage I guess I’m look­ing at pro­gram­ming some­thing to take the Google ICS and get rid of the inform­a­tion I don’t want pub­lished. It seems a little silly that I can’t read­ily share a free/busy sched­ule between sys­tems that sup­posedly are set up to allow sub­scrip­tions to other people’s cal­en­dars, so I’m won­der­ing what I’m missing.

Update Sep 20: hav­ing calmed down a bit over the week­end, I looked at the ics file that Google Cal­en­dar cre­ates with the free/busy, and com­pared to the usual ics file. The solu­tion is to find and replace “VREEBUSY” with “VEVENT”. Upload that edited .ics file to the client’s Web­Dav server, prob­lem solved. OK, it isn’t auto­matic, but my appoint­ments don’t change that fre­quently. And when I have a few spare moments I’ll script it.

2010 09 17 Technology Comments (6) Permalink

Busy, Busy

Like many people I know, the dicho­tomy between doing and blog­ging is often resolved by more doing, and not so much blog­ging, espe­cially with Twit­ter, Identi.ca, et al around for the quick asides. Time to craft a care­ful post is in short sup­ply, espe­cially suf­fi­cient time to craft a post that looks effortless.

But today one of my pro­jects has fin­ished one major phase so I’m tak­ing some time. I’ve star­ted work­ing in health­care, or more pre­cisely, doing pro­ject man­age­ment on a pro­ject basis for Alschuler Asso­ci­ates, involving lots of XML, lots of cli­ent dis­cus­sions, and work­ing with a dis­trib­uted team across 3 timezones. It’s inter­est­ing, and com­plic­ated, and I still feel like I’m just get­ting star­ted although I’ve been work­ing on it for almost six months.

And it’s just as well those pro­jects are in a slower spell, since in a little over a week the XML Sum­mer School starts, for which I’m Course Dir­ector. Most of the prep work has been done, and soon the fun and learn­ing start. I enjoy going each year, catch­ing up on new tech­no­lo­gies, learn­ing more about the ones I’ve heard about before but haven’t had a chance to try out, catch­ing up on what’s new in the world of XML. I didn’t make it to Bal­is­age this year due to pro­ject com­mit­ments (see above); the XML Sum­mer School makes up for that to some extent. And this year we’re in Oxford at the right time for the St Giles Fair, which makes for a change to the usual pub crawl.

Other pro­jects are tak­ing a back seat, unfor­tu­nately. There’s only so much time in the day, and so many inter­est­ing things to fill it with.

2010 08 27 General Comments (1) Permalink

Amazon Spam

Some­times spam is amus­ing. Email address and actual links elided, but the rest is as it arrived in my inbox:

Thanks for your order, my email address

Did you know you can view and edit your orders online, 24 hours a day? Visit Your Account.

Order Information:

E-mail Address:  my email address
Order Grand Total: $ 97.99

Earn 3% rewards on your Amazon.com orders with the Amazon Visa Card. Learn More

Order Summary:
Details:
Order #: 	D99-2665292-8925183
Subtotal of items: 	$ 82.99
	------
Total before tax: 	$ 29.99
Sales Tax: 	$ 0.00
	------
Total for this Order: 	$ 47.99

The following item was ordered:
	Click here and see items, Price: $ 48.99
By: Click here
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

I par­tic­u­larly like the way none of the num­bers bear any rela­tion­ship to each other, except for end­ing in “.99″.

Tagged ,
2010 07 24 General Comments (2) Permalink

Google Apps and Google Docs

For small com­pan­ies, like my one-person con­sult­ing shop and many of my cli­ents, using Google Apps is an obvi­ous solu­tion to the prob­lem of email and shar­ing doc­u­ments and cal­en­dars. The stand­ard edi­tion is usu­ally enough, which makes it free as well. So far email also seems to be delivered more quickly than through my old web­site host.

The most com­plic­ated part of set­ting up Google Apps is con­fig­ur­ing the DNS cor­rectly; that’s the sub­ject of another post. The most con­fus­ing part of using it, how­ever, con­tinu­ally bites and until Google fixes it (and I can’t ima­gine they’re not aware of the prob­lem), will con­tinue to annoy.

Here’s the issue. I signed up for a Google account (docs, primar­ily) using my stand­ard email address. Then I set up a Google Apps account for Tex­tu­al­ity where I have the same email address, and a Google Apps ver­sion of doc­u­ments, cal­en­dar, etc. I now have two Google accounts with the same email address, dif­fer­ent pass­words, dif­fer­ent URLs to log into at, and they show dif­fer­ent con­tents. If someone shares a doc­u­ment with me using my stand­ard email address, it some­times shows up in the non-Apps account, and some­times in the Apps account, and occa­sion­ally in both. I have yet to fig­ure out the algorithm by which the Google doc­u­ments shar­ing mech­an­ism decides which account (with the same email address, remem­ber) gets which document.

I’m sure (or at least hope) that Google will fix the prob­lem even­tu­ally. In the mean­time, it’s some­thing to be aware of.

2010 04 05 Technology Comments (4) Permalink