Wordpress Upgrade 'Fail'

Wordpress 2.8.2 fixes a XSS vulnerability introduced in v2.8.1. Since I don't want to be vulnerable, I did the automatic upgrade from within the admin panel.

The proces, which worked so far since v2.7, hung after approximately 30 seconds. After that the only responds I got was:

"Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute."

It took about 10 minutes to start feeling a bit uncomfortably. The upgrade failed somewhere along the line. At least so it seemed. Searching Google I found this link. It seems that removing the .maintenance file in the Wordpress blog root removes the message and should (re)start the upgrade automatically.

Guess what? It did. So kudos to the developpers for creating failsaves in the upgrade engine.

Internal Server Errors

I've been experiencing some 500 errors on my blog (HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error). During these occasions, the SymCAImport tools seems to work fine, while the Wordpress installment hogs. So PHP screw-ups are less likely.

A brief conversation with the support department @ Dreamhost, suggested a Wordpress theme/plugin malfunction. So I downloaded the latest theme version, and deactivated most plugins. Let see how long thing keep working.
Anyone other ideas?

UPDATE: Got additional information from Dreamhost about the 500 errors. It seems that there was a 'naughty' person clogging up the cluster/server resources.

SymCAImport ported to PHP

and moved off-site.

It's been a while, but I finally found some time to convert the SymCAImport service from Coldfusion to php. This means that the service run @ Dreamhost. The only thing that remains is migrating my mail to a hosting service. After that, the servers I've got running at home will be obsolete.

The new SymCAImport URL is http://symcaimport.redelijkheid.com/. The CA certificates which were uploaded to the old service (symcaimport.redelijkheid.com) will remain there for the maximum of 7 days, but they are also accessible under the new service (/symcaimport/ca/<certificate>.der). An automatic forwarder will be used after 7 days to redirect everyone to the new location.

New uploads can be done by using the new URL.

Errors, warning, or other questions can be placed in the comments.

UPDATE: permissions on the download location were incorrect. Should be working correctly from now on....

Website Downtime

It seems that my hoster Dreamhost ran into some problems yesterday. Lot's of websites returned 'Internal Service Errors' or ' Service Temporarily Unavailable'. These errors only occurred when addressing php content and not while accessing static html-files. So most likely a PHP (config) 'feature'.

The thing that annoys me the most about this downtime is not that it lasted almost a day, but the lack of communication. No mention of problems on their status page, and support-feedback was also thin.

I rather have a couple of days downtime, and knowing what the problem is (hard disk crash, power failure, human error), than 1 hour and not (ever) knowing what happened.

Anyway, the problem seems to be solved (for now), but I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the feedback issue.

UPDATE: Got feedback from Dreamhost.com that everything should be working. No feedback (yet) on the cause of the problem though.

Move To Hosting Provider

When you're reading this it will mean that I've moved my website to an external hosting service. This has some drawbacks:

• The SymCAImport tool will be available through another URL (http://symcaimport.redelijkheid.com /symcaimport/). I also editted all previous posts with the old SymCAImport URL.
• Some other services will also be moved to other locations. More on that when they are up and running.

The advantages are a more reliable uptime, and faster up- and download speeds.

There might be some things I might have missed in the transfer. Leave a comment if you find errors or strange behaviour on the website.

UPDATE: I forgot the MIME type settings on the SymCAImport tool. If you did encounter problems importing, you might wanna try again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 13:49 by Willem

Moved the website to SquareSpace.com in the mean time. The SymCAImport Tool has moved back to http://symcaimport.redelijkheid.com

Wordpress 2.6.1 Fixed the Permalink Bug

The highly anticipated Wordpress version 2.6.1 is finally released. This version fixes the permalin bug I reported on earlier.

Upgrading was a piece of cake (I think). First gonna check all the plugin functionalities......

There Goes My Traffic

Last week I reported that the upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 didn't go as planned. Well, the upgrade went fine, but it seems that there's a permalinks bug. The 'old' URL's won't work, so I have to cope with a "?p=449" notation of the links to my posts. A direct consequence of this is that everybody using a search engine to find stuff on my blog ends up on my website, but not on the page with the actual article.

From over 600 pageviews per day a week ago, there's a small 40 a day left :-( .

It may be that the new Wordpress 2.6.1 Beta 2 solves this issue, but it may also break other things. Let's hope they release the next (working) version yesterday.

Major Wordpress 2.6 Bug

A couple of days ago I upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After the upgrade I opened the blog, and added a new post. Both of those actions worked properly.

After the upgrade I noticed a major decrease in comment and trackback spam. But today I discovered the real reason why comments AND page views were close to zero.

There's a bug in Wordpress 2.6 where the permalinks are not working correctly. If you're using permalinks with the date, name, etc. (e.g. /index.php/switched-to-mac/) you get a 'Not Found' error. A definite WTF moment.

When you change the permalinks setup in the wordpress admin pages to default the pages/posts are accessible again. It seems that the issue is known and will be fixed in Wordpress 2.6.1. Untill then, most of the Google search results which end up on my website will result in a 'Not Found' error.

I would go back to an earlier version if I could. After the upgrade (which I thought that worked correctly) I removed the 2.5 installment... Yet another lesson for the future.

UPDATE: the pageviews are returning to normal :)

Upgrading is Getting Easier

Normally I would be planning a Wordpress update/upgrade, because I have made several changes to some core files. Just to make life a little easier (mostly mail related).
But this time, I had about ten minutes to spare, and 'what the heck.., why not upgrade this minute?'.

Well 3 minutes later everything was up and running again (I even upgraded PHP to a more recent version in the same timeframe). Either I'm getting better at this, or upgrading has been made much easier :)

UPDATE: there's also 'some' improvement on catching commentspam. Before the upgrade I had about 20-30 comment/trackback spams in my Aksimet queue. But since the update the queue remains empty :-)

Massive Blog Spam

I, and probably the rest of the world as well, am being hit with spam in the comments at this moment. Over 100 comments a day are intercepted by Akismet.

It seems that all the spamjerks have found a way of creating userprofiles on public websites/forums/blogs and are referring to those in the spam. Below are some examples URL's which were active at the time of me writing this:

• http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/profile.jspa?editMode=true&userID=678271
• http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/profile.php?id=699061

I send an e-mai lto Lonely Planet descibing their problem. Let's hope that they fix it soon.

In the mean time; All hail Akismet!!!!