Posts filed under Website

Redelijkheid.com as a FireFox Search Engine

While the content on my website increases, it's getting (a bit) harder to find certain content. Sure, there's this search form in the top right of the website, but this means that you have to open the website first, enter the keyword and hit 'Enter'.

To speed things up I created a custom FireFox search engine. Using this I can search for content on my website directly from the browser. No matter what site I'm currently on.

The custom search engines are located in the profiles directory.

OSX: ~/Library/Application Data/Firefox/profiles/<random>/searchplugins/<searchengine>.xml

Windows: c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random>\searchplugins\<searchengine>.xml

By adding the following XML file (right-click - Save As) to the directory listed above, you add the Redelijkheid.com search engine to your Firefox search engines.

Posted on August 13, 2009 and filed under Browsers, Internet, Personal, Website.

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.

Posted on July 20, 2009 and filed under Annoying, Personal, Website, WordPress.

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.

Posted on June 1, 2009 and filed under Annoying, Website, WordPress.

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....

Posted on May 29, 2009 and filed under Website.

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.

Posted on May 20, 2009 and filed under Annoying, Website.

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.

Posted on January 26, 2009 and filed under Personal, Website, WordPress.

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.

Posted on August 14, 2008 and filed under Annoying, Website, WordPress.