Blogging with WordPress » Website admin

Site consuming excessive resources

Rodney Smith — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:48:18 +0000

Apologies if you tried to access this site in the last few days only to be told it’s suspended – I was informed by my web host that it was consuming excessive resources. This came as quite a surprise to me as it’s not a particularly high traffic site, nor have I been aware of any problems with it in the past.

Culprit plugins

In any case, I take my host’s word for it that it was causing undue load on the server, so I set about lightening it up a bit. I very much doubt anything in the WordPress core would be causing the problem, so the first thing I did was scan through my list of plugins. That, along with a bit of research on Google, suggested a couple of possible culprits: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, Global Translator, and Broken Link Checker. Although some have reported problems with YARPP in the past, later versions have been significantly rewritten to address these problems, so I’m inclined to think it’s not the cause here.

On the other hand, I’ve personally noticed fairly intensive processing associated with the other two mentioned above, so I immediately deactivated them. In addition, I deleted almost 30 megabytes of cached page translations since these will no longer be used, and added some redirects to my .htaccess file to redirect search traffic and any bookmarks of the translated pages back to the original English versions:

RedirectMatch 301 /pt/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1 RedirectMatch 301 /zh-CN/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1 RedirectMatch 301 /nl/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
etc.

I’m no expert on rewriting URLs, but I think that’ll do the trick. So, apologies if you’ve come to this site hoping to be able to read it in your own language, but I’ll only be publishing in English from now on.

WP Super Cache plugin

Finally, I did what everyone else does in these circumstances – I installed a caching plugin. This reduces a site’s server load by creating static html versions of pages as they are requested, which are then served the next time anyone hits the page. This means none of the php scripts or database calls are executed the second time around, so the server has to do a lot less work per pageview. It also has the benefit that cached pages are served quicker, and thus provides a better user experience.

Hopefully the combination of the above will resolve the problem to my host’s satisfaction and you’ll be able to read more of my incredible content next time you visit; otherwise I guess I’ve been talking rubbish, but you won’t be able to read it anyway!

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How secure is your site?

Rodney Smith — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:00:43 +0000

In the last 24 hours, I’ve had two seperate phishing emails, pointing to dummy banking sites, as they do. Both had set up shop, so to speak, by commandering someone else’s site and setting up their replica pages in a deeply nested sub-directory – exactly like the parasites they are! Presumably, the site owners did not even realise there was anything afoot.

This prompted me to wonder how the perpetrators had gained access, and how secure my own sites are. So I did a bit of research, specifically in the area of securing WordPress (although many of the principles apply to other kinds of site too)…

What you can do to protect your site

There’s a lot you can do actually – some quite technical, some much easier. In reality it’s probably very difficult and beyond the ability of most of us to fully secure our sites, but unless you’re dealing with very sensitive (ie financial) information, you probably don’t need to.

When being chased by a lion, you don’t need to be able to outrun the lion, just the guy next to you! The same principle applies here: make it sufficiently difficult to get into your site, and the bad guys will be inclined to give up and move on to easier pickings.

Stay up to date. As various vulnerabilities are exposed, upgrades are released to fix them, both to core WordPress, and to various plugins and themes. By upgrading, you don’t stop hackers finding new ways in, but at least you shouldn’t fall victim to known exploits.
Make regular backups of your entire site – database and all the files that make up your site. This won’t stop you from getting hacked, but could make it a lot easier to recover from it. Also really handy if your web server goes up in flames one day .
Use a decent password. This should be something that’s hard to guess, and should contain a mix of upper and lower case letters and digits. And no, “password” and “letmein” don’t qualify!
Keep your finger on the pulse of your blog. Check your stats (probably not a problem for most bloggers – we’re generally pretty obsessed with this anyway); look out for unusual activity.

Find out more

If you’re interested in finding out more, I recommend you check out Wordprezzie’s list of very practical security tips. BlogSecurity has a very good (but quite technical) free WordPress security white paper which you can download, and also has a scanner to check your site for vulnerabilities.

If that doesn’t satisfy you, do what I did: search Google for WordPress security.

More info...

Easiest way to manage broken links

Rodney Smith — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:00:14 +0000

Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!

Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way – the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links – I had no idea!

Broken Link Checker plugin

This nifty plugin runs in the background anytime you’ve got your admin console open, and produces a report in the dashboard if it finds any dud links or missing images. Each row in the table also has a number of options that allow you to fix the problem without leaving the admin console, so it’s quick and easy to fix them.

Configuration

As you can see, configuration is straightforward:

Status – this alerts you to any problems found, with a link to the management page. You can also manually restart the scanning process, although this should rarely be necessary.
Check every post – here you can configure how frequently your site will be checked.
Broken link CSS – until they are fixed, by default any broken links will be displayed as crossed out, as a visual cue to your visitors.
Exclusion list – I haven’t found a need to use this as yet.
Work session length – pretty self-explanatory!
“Delete Post” option – the plugin author doesn’t recommend you use this, and neither do I!

If you change any of these values, don’t forget to click the Update Options button.

Fixing broken links

The management screen displays a table, with each row representing a broken link or missing image. It looks like this:

Here’s a brief explanation of each of the columns:

Post – displays the title of the post or page which has the broken link
Link text – displays the link text
URL – displays the faulty URL, along with an Edit option for you to correct it
View – this allows you to view the post or page, as seen by your visitors
Edit Post – this takes you to the post editor so you can make changes in context
Discard – this removes the row from the table, although it will reappear with the next scan if the link hasn’t been fixed.
Unlink – this gives you the option to remove the link from the post, whilst retaining the link text.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best thing about this plugin is that once you’ve set it up, you can more or less forget about it, and just leave it to run in the background, safe in the knowledge that it’s got your back, and will notify you of any problems. Definitely one to go on the must have list!

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The 2 best ways to Redirect a URL

Rodney Smith — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:00:07 +0000

Image courtesy of Darwin BellIt’s happened to us all. One day you’re merrily surfing along, you click a link, and Bam, you get a page not found error. Why, what happened? Well, chances are the link you followed used to resolve to a legitimate page, but the page has now been taken down or moved to a new location. Couldn’t it have left a forwarding address? Well actually, yes it could (and should) have.

What’s so bad about broken links?

Firstly, it creates a very bad impression for your site’s visitors. Someone who is presented with a page not found message may, if you’re lucky, use your search facility to try and track down what he was looking for. But chances are he’ll simply move on to the next site and you’ll have lost him.

Secondly, consider what happens when a search engine bot encounters that 404 header – the url will be removed from the index, and consequently all the traffic that search engine may have sent your way disappears. Considering how hard it can be to acquire backlinks in the first place, it’s very careless to let that happen.

Sometimes moving pages is unavoidable

You should do your level best to maintain the integrity of your site map, which is made up of all your publically accessible urls. After all, there’s a reason they’re called permalinks – they’re supposed to be permanent! But sometimes it is necessary to shuffle things around, for example when a page is no longer relevent because you no longer offer a particular service. What to do then?

This is where url redirection comes into play. There are actually many ways of redirecting a url, but I want to cover what I consider to be the two best ones (because they’re browser-independent and work equally well for humans and search engine bots):

Redirection using .htaccess

The .htaccess file in Apache web servers (and most sites in the world are served by Apache) is a very powerful way of over-riding all kinds of configuration settings. I don’t claim to be an expert on all the things you can do with it, but redirecting a url is very easy.

Note: because your .htaccess file is so critical, it’s advisable to take a backup before modifying it. That way, if you do get yourself into trouble, you simply have to restore the previous version to fix things.

Let’s say you want to redirect http://domain.com/old.html to http://domain.com/new.html (obviously substitute your specific domain and page names where appropriate). Simply add the following to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

Redirect 301 /old.html http://domain.com/new.html

Note that if you’re using WordPress, your .htaccess file should already include the RewriteEngine directive, so you will only need to add the line containing the actual redirection command.

Save the file, then test that it works by navigating to http://domain.com/old.html – you should end up at http://domain.com/new.html.

Redirection using php

This method is commonly used to hide affiliate links (the rationale is that certain types of visitors are less likely to click links they perceive to be affilate-related).

Let’s say you want to mask http://affiliate.com?id=aff-code. Simply create a php file with a more innocuous name – I’ll call mine innocuous.php – and include the following in it (again substituting your specific affiliate link):


	header("Location: http://affiliate.com?id=aff-code");

?>

Now, instead of embedding http://affiliate.com?id=aff-code in your site’s pages, you use http://domain.com/innocuous.php. This also puts the affiliate link in a single place, so if you should ever need to change it, you only have to edit this one file, rather than find all the places it’s referenced throughout your site.

One thing to note about this approach is that you will end up with a single php file for each url you redirect. Whereas with the first approach you still only have a single .htaccess file, no matter how many urls you are redirecting. I personally don’t see this as a problem though.

So there you have it: two top ways to redirect urls, and eliminate broken links from your site forever!

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Easiest way to manage broken links

How to resize images using GIMP

Rodney Smith — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:51:17 +0000

As I mentioned previously, a few well-chosen images can really help to give your blog a visual lift. One problem that you may have come across though is that often image files can be quite substantial in terms of size. So today I want to show you how to resize them using GIMP, a popular open-source image editor.

Image courtesy of cpt.spock

Should I care?

Well yes, you should. Big files use more bandwidth, which translates to slower loading times for your visitors; if your page takes too long to come up, they might just give up and look elsewhere. And bear in mind there are still people using dial-up connections to access the internet – be kind to them.

It also wastes your bandwidth, which is something to bear in mind if you host the images on your own server. Most hosting packages have limits to the amount of disk space and bandwidth allocated to each account, even if they claim to be “unlimited”. If you experience a sudden surge of traffic (as you might if you hit the popular page in a social bookmarking site), you might find yourself chewing through your monthly bandwidth allocation in just a few days.

Note that it’s perfectly easy to change the apparent size of an image on-screen using HTML or CSS styling, but this will not change the amount of data that’s getting downloaded to the browser. For that, you need to read on…

Getting started

If you don’t already have GIMP, now’s the time to download and install it. GIMP is open-source (ie free), and cross-platform (it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac), so you’ve got no excuse!

I’m also assuming you have an image that needs resizing. If not, go and find one – a digital snap you’ve taken yourself will do, or have a look on flickr or stock.xchng.

Step 1: open the image in GIMP

There are different ways of doing this:

via the menu: select File > Open… from the GIMP menu, navigate to the file in your file system, and click Open.
or you can simply drag the image file onto the GIMP palette from your file system.

Step 2: resize the image

The width of the main content area on this blog is 500 pixels, but most images you take with a digital camera, or download from the internet are a lot bigger. So I like to scale down any images I use to around 450px wide, so they fit in nicely without stretching or squashing them. Bear in mind that halving the width of an image while maintaining the same aspect ratio reduces the file size by a factor of 4!.

Select Image > Scale Image… from the menu in the editor window.
Change the Width field to the size you require. As long as you have the aspect lock turned on, GIMP should calculate the height for you, in order to retain the same aspect ratio. You can of course over-ride this if you want the image to appear stretched horizontally or vertically.
Leave the other values as they are and click the Scale button.

Step 3: save the image

Most images on the web are saved in .jpg format, which is an efficient way of compressing photographic images. There is a trade-off here between file size and image quality, so you’ll have to be the judge of how much compression to apply. Generally I think a ratio of 50-60% works well, but it does depend somewhat on the image.

Select File > Save As… from the menu in the editor window.
Enter a Name and file extension (.jpg)
Select the location where you would like the file saved.
Click the Save button.
A window may pop up warning you that the “JPEG plugin cannot handle transparency”, and that your image will be flattened. Click Export.
In the Save as JPG window, tick the Show preview in image window checkbox. This lets you see the effect of adjusting the Quality ratio, and also has the benefit of showing you the target file size.
Adjust the Quality value to around 50, in order to minimize the file size while still retaining some image quality (you may want to tweak it up or down a bit).
Make sure the Advanced Options are set as below.
Click Save.

Step 4: upload the image to your web server

I’m not going to say too much about this; instead I’ll direct you to a previous post I did on how to use FileZilla to FTP files to your web server.

That concludes this tutorial. Thanks for stopping by.

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How to use FTP to transfer files

Rodney Smith — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:42:49 +0000

The other day I mentioned in passing that I’d needed to transfer some files to my web server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), so thought I’d elaborate on that a bit. Now, modern blogging platforms like WordPress have drastically reduced the need to use FTP for day-to-day tasks like posting articles and such, but if you run your own website or blog, you will find that you need to use it at some point for things like:

Retrieving backups
Installing plugins
Redirecting URLs

What is FTP?

Wikipedia defines FTP as

…a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network, such as the Internet.

It all sounds a bit scary and technical (which no doubt it is behind the scenes), but luckily we don’t have to bother with all that, as there are tools that shield us from the complexities.

My favourite is one called FileZilla, for a number of reasons:

It’s free and open-source
It’s cross-platform (meaning it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux)
It’s easy to use

I’m going to assume for the rest of this article that you’re using FileZilla, although a lot of the principles apply equally to other FTP software.

What do I need?

Apart from FTP software, you also need to have FTP access to the web server where your site resides. Most web hosting packages provide this as default, but if you’re not sure you should check with your hosting provider. They need to provide you with a username and password you can use to gain access to your files on the web server via FTP (normally this is the same username and password you use for your cPanel).

Let’s get started

Without further ado, let’s get stuck in. The steps we need to follow are:

Step 1: Configure a connection

Launch FileZilla, then select File > Site Manager from the menu. This opens up the Site Manager dialog which is where you configure connection parameters for your web server.

Now do the following:

Press the New Site button.
Type in a name for the connection (I normally use the name of the website).
Enter the Host as your domain name (eg hippowebsolutions.com).
For the Logontype, change Anonymous to Normal.
In the User field, enter the username supplied to you by your web host.
In the Password field, enter the password supplied to you by your web host.
Finally click OK to save the configuration settings.

Step 2: Connect to the server

To establish a connection to your web server, open the Site Manager dialog again, select the connection you configured in step 1, and click the Connect button. If all is well you should see some log messages scrolling by in the message log panel, and you will be connected to your web server.

Step 3: Transfer file(s)

The main FileZilla user interface is divided into a number of panes:

From top to bottom these are:

Message Log pane
Directory Tree pane, divided in two, representing respectively the local and remote folder s
Folder Contents pane, also divided in two
Transfer Queue pane

The main ones of interest are the local and remote Directory Trees and Folder Contents. Transferring a file from one to the other is as simple as double-clicking it. So to upload to the server (ie: transfer from left to right), double-click the file in the left pane, or right-click it and select Upload. Conversely, to download something from the server to your local machine, double-click the file in the right pane, or right-click it and select Download. Or you can drag items from one side to the other.

You can also create and delete files and folders, transfer entire folders or groups of files, etc. Basically the same functionality you would expect to find in any file manager.

Step 4: Disconnect from the server

Once you’re finished, and all transfers have completed (check the Transfer Queue to be sure), you can disconnect from the remote server by selecting the Server > Disconnect option from the menu. Most servers will also terminate the connection automatically after a period of inactivity.

I hope that’s helped dispel any aura of difficulty about FTP. Basically, it’s as easy as moving files around your computer’s hard disk drive!

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