Whoops! A bunch of our blogs are still on a shared host, and I guess they were putting too much load on the server. Without warning, I’m staring at a “Your Account Has Been Suspended” message! We are getting ready to move everything over to a new dedicated server, and as such, a few things have slipped through the cracks.

If you’re running Wordpress, it’s vital that you keep up-to-date with plugin updates. WP makes it easier than ever, since it now tells you when a new version is available for download! Our “excuse” was that we had 25 blogs running on this host, and going through each one and updating the plugins was very time consuming. Whoops!

Another HUGE oversight was not installing any sort of caching. Most people use WP-Cache, and it works very well for the most part. But for whatever reason, when I setup these blogs way back when, I didn’t enable WP-Cache. (I think it was screwing up one of our counters - A stupid reason not to run caching, in retrospect..)

I discovered WP Super Cache awhile back.. This is WP-Cache on steroids! We had a story picked up by a major news media source, and it resulted in 18,000+ hits in 24 hours! It was chaos, and our server became COMPLETELY unresponsive. I was able to enable WP Super Cache, and the situation was quickly contained.

At that moment, I should have gone out and installed it on all of our other sites. But with a thousand other things going on at the time, I put it on the backburner. Big mistake! Luckily, I was on the server when we got shut down, so I was able to contact support, find out what was going on, and address the issue immediately. But what if this happened next month, when I’m down in Punta Cana without Internet Access? I’d be SOL, as I’m the only one who knows anything about the servers - The rest of my staff just writes..

So learn from my mistakes, and protect yourself from future issues.. Update your plugins, and make sure you’re using caching so you don’t piss off your hosting company!

As I mentioned last week, Wordpress 2.5 was riddled with bugs.. Now today we get word that 2.5.1 has been released, and includes a “very important security update”.

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

In addition to the security fix, Wordpress 2.5.1 contains over 70 bug fixes. Here are some highlights.

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Thank god! Download Wordpress 2.5.1 Now!

Another day, and another issue with the new image uploading system in Wordpress 2.5.

This is the second problem I’ve had with the new image uploading system, and I’m definitely not alone.. Thankfully, there’s a quick fix for this particular error.

FTP into your web hosting account, and edit your .htaccess file. Insert the following code at the bottom of your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Save your file, go back into your dashboard, and you should be able to upload images now.

Rumor has it that 2.5 was rushed to coincide with WordCamp, and as such a bunch of bugs “slipped through the cracks”. Hopefully all of these issues will be addressed in Wordpress 2.5.1. Personally, I’d prefer an option to disable the uploader, as nothing was wrong with the old way of handling images!

Now that Fantastico has added Wordpress 2.5 to the mix, you’ll see more and more bloggers upgrading to the latest version. This is a pretty major upgrade, and there are a few things to be aware of before making the move.

1) BACKUP YOUR FILES!!

Sure, Fantastico makes life easy, but I ran into an unexpected quirk yesterday, and it could happen to you as well. What happens if you run out of disk space? Your backup won’t be made, and if the upgrade fails (which mine did), you’re in a world of trouble. Luckily, I had a backup of the database for this site, or else I would have lost probably 6 days worth of posts.

So what went wrong? Fantastico backs up EVERYTHING when upgrading, which in my case included a Podcast directory with 100MB+ of MP3s. Unfortunately, this site was hosted on a basic plan that only included 400MB of storage space, and I was already using 345MB of space prior to upgrading. Do the math, and you’ll see that I maxed out my quota, and the upgrade aborted midstream.

2) The Media Gallery doesn’t work!

This was fun, as a moderator on the Wordpress forum initially swore up and down that this wasn’t a bug. After a million people chimed in with the same problem, he pulled his head out of his ass, and actually addressed the issue. The fix? A new media.php and handlers.js file that can be downloaded from the sticky in the WP forum. If you’re running Firefox, you probably didn’t have an issue, but if you were running IE, you’d likely just see a blank page.

Other than that, things seem pretty good.. The dashboard definitely takes some time to get used to, but as with all things, you’ll eventually get used to it. If you come across any other issues, let us know and we’ll be happy to help.