Adventures with WordPress auto update plugin

You may or may not have noticed the blog went a bit wonky (in tech speak). This was due to a few issues with regards upgrading the wordpress installation, and then the K2 templates that I am using. So, just in case anyone comes across any of my issues, hopefully this will help you:

First off I installed an auto update plugin from Keith Dsouza which I hoped would make the upgrade process easier, and less scary. Plugin installation went without a hitch, but on activation I received:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 46080 bytes) in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-admin/admin- functions.php on line 864

When trying to access the admin panel. Eeek! The site carried on serving ok, which was a good thing, but I could not access the admin to write new content etc, what to do??? I dropped Keith a line, Keith got straight back (thanks Keith) with a suggestion:

This is probably because their host has allocated less memory for php to run and has to be rectified by your host.

Here is a solution to overcome this from one of my commentators

I had the same error with other plug-ins, until I changed the .htaccess file and gave WordPress more memory to work with. I put this code in the start of the file:

<FilesMatch “\.(php|html?)$”>

php_value memory_limit 32M

</FilesMatch>

I tried this, no joy, scratched head, checked error again and realized that there must be some setting in the php installation that I could update to sort the lack of memory that php was reporting.

A quick google and I found that I could edit the php.ini file in /etc/ to adjust how much memory php has to play with, amended:

memory_limit = 8M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)

To:

memory_limit = 16M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB)

Saved the file and tried to access the blog admin panel – Huzzah!

So that was nice, thank you Google and the peeps that post help on forums :O)

Now I had me site back, it all looked a bit cack though, another quick Google to find that there is a new release of the K2 templates HERE. Grabbed that and an accompanying plugin to disable WP now standard sidebar widgets HERE to make sure the K2 doodads all work nicey.

Now we I am back to where I want to be. With the added bonus that I have a great autoupdate plugin that takes all the stress out of the Word Press update process, although why WP don’t include this by default is beyond me? Maybe they should speak to Keith Dsouza.

Hope that helps anyone else that may have similar issues.

Rampant Apple geekery

I am watching MacRumors Apple WWDC (world wide dev conf) updates to see what new Apple gear I can spend my hard earned money on, this is indeed a new low. I will of course later be mooching about for a webcast of Steve Jobs keynote to see what the “secret” features of the new OS X Leopard are.

I will then go shave my head and paint myself green. I am an Apple whore.

UPDATE: OS X Leopard looking very nice indeed, have a look October can’t come soon enough, hopefully they’ll get the iPhone out in Europe by then as well.

Blog: What to do?

Since moving to wordpress I have gained a hell of a lot more flexability in what I want to achieve with this. Now after playing around for a few weeks it strikes me that the posts may seem a little random in subject matter to you. You may have arrived here to read an Apple related article, but are not so interested in what socks I have been wearing this week, and what I did over the weekend.

A quick mooch reveals that WordPress also have another application, WordPressMU (Multiple User) with which I could create multiple blogs, each dedicated to it’s own specific categories. I might as well dive in and sort this now before this site grows too big. I had a nice adventure in upgrading this installation of wp last night and hosed the site for a few hours, luckily I backed up the important files, so it didn’t take long to get back up and running again, so now I am in the mood to get hands dirty and upgrade to an even more flexible platform.

So what do you think? Feedback appreciated, I am currently using Google analytics to measure site traffic, so I know it’s not just mother checking in once in a blue moon.

Apple iTunes – Edit description field

Have recently been converting a lot of video to .m4v format to manage video playback through Apple iTunes (7.1.1), now when I export stuff “for iPod” from my elgato eyeTV software, the resulting video files, when imported into iTunes have a description field. I have not been able to edit this field with iTunes (get info) or add descriptions to videos I have added from other sources.

Well I found a solution (although it would be nice if Apple managed to add this to a future release) over @ dougscripts, hopefully that helps someone else out there :O)

Me long term Geek – proof

Do you ever vanity search? Pop your own name into google/yahoo/search engine of choice, and see if you can find any mention of yourself? I do all the time, just in case any hot chicks are talking about me (and they do).

Well, they may no longer, a recent vanity search led me to proof positive that I am a long term geek, with no prospect of recovery. But I am proud, after all, how many of you can say that Merlin of the famous “Merlins Cave” adventure game page in Acorn Electron User magazine chose you, out of the tens of twats that wrote in, to include a comment in his sacred place HUH?

CHECK IT OUT 4th column, first paragraph, November 1985 – I doth truly ruleth, jealous?

Feel free to print out a copy and show your friends, tell them “I know him” and know that that will increase your cool ratio.

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