2008 August | Real Estate Blog Lab

Google Sitemap Generator 3.1.0.1 Issues

By Dave Smith Friday August 29, 2008

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A couple of month ago I upgraded the lab to WP 2.6. You will remember I wasn’t to happy with what was going on at the time. I’m still finding some issues but for the most part have learned to live with it.

I’ve also upgraded three other blogs to WP 2.6.1 in the past week.

Google Sitemap Generator

When I upgraded the lab I also upgraded the Google sitemap generator from 2.7.1 to the current version 3.1.0.1 A couple of days later while checking my Google webmaster tools, specifically the sitemap, I stopped breathing when I saw out of 175 pages there were only 9 indexed. It took less than the time of a speeding bullet to reach the end of a gun for me to run a quick site search and discover they were really all there.

I also started getting WARNING messages about pages not being able to be found, lots of them. I’ve not done anything about it. I probably should have, till now that is.

All the other blogs were reporting normal stats and no warning messages, TILL TODAY! I upgraded on Monday and today they are all showing similar results ALL BUT ONE. The one blog still reporting accurately I did not upgrade. I’ve just set the other blogs back to the 2.7.1 version of Google Sitemap Generator.

I’m hoping in a few day the error and WARNING messages will go away and things will return to LOL “normal”.

Have you checked on your Google Sitemap lately?

Askimet 2.1.8 Issues

By Dave Smith Friday August 29, 2008

I’ve recently upgraded three blogs to WP 2.6.1. When I try and do anything with a comment that is flagged spam, I get an error message.

If I check them as not spam an error message appears about not being able to modify a header file.

If I try and delete them SAME MESSAGE.

The workaround has been to go back to version 2.1.6. Everything functions as it should in that version.

Is anyone else experiencing this same thing with Askimet 2.1.8 ?

Header Image Rotator and WP Super Cache

By Dave Smith Friday August 29, 2008

I recently installed the WP Super Cache plugin on Tucson AZ Real Estate. I’ve installed it here at the lab as well. I hadn’t noticed any difference in how fast the blog loads, but I did notice something this morning. I’m using the Header Image Rotator Plugin on that blog. The Header images which should be rotating every minute weren’t rotating. It seemed as if whatever images was displaying the first time I opened a page or post became cached with that page. Every time I now open a page/post it has the image associated with the first time I opened it.

If you want the image to rotate every minute, you will need to turn off WP Super Cache. But if you like the idea that as readers navigate your site they will have different headers images appearing in less than a minutes time the way they function together becomes a bonus. But it will always be the image first associated with the page/post when it was opened by them the first time during your cache cycle.

Even forcing an F5 refresh does not rotate the image. The good news, it does eventually cycle to a new image, it depends on the expire time you have set for the cache. The posts do seem to load quicker.

If you have been banging your head against a wall trying to figure out why your images aren’t rotating. This could very well be the reason if you have both of these plugins activated on your blog. Each is doing it job.

WP Super Cache and Theme Edits

One last thought, if you are making changes to your theme, it would be a good idea to turn off any cacheing while you are doing so. It might keep you sane for a little while longer, or maybe not. : )

The Lab Rat Report Continued

By Dave Smith Wednesday August 27, 2008

On Monday I wrote about the Hosting Day from Hell that took almost 12 hours to get everything back up and running. I was going to have this post live yesterday, but something call “Life” intervened and I was in the real world for most of the day. Geez out there it is really scary.

Options, I really needed options and I needed them fast. I don’t know about you but I get a lot of targeted traffic on my blogs and having two of them unaccessible was unacceptable. There are more than a dozen blogs on this particular hosting package and they were all down. The gateway to their folders was blocked. I had tired the usual of removing the htaccess file but that hadn’t worked. What to do.

One of the bogs hosted is a relatively new one. For No REal Reason. It is just about “stuff”. None related random thoughts and stuff I want to write about but don’t have anyplace to put it. So I bought www.ForNoREalReason.com and set up a blog.

Move to the other Hosting Package

I don’t like having all my eggs in one basket. I’m running a business off my blogs. I don’t blog to get leads, I blog because it is my business model for marketing. If my site is down I’m not doing business. It is also why I have more than one site. If something should happen to one, I have the others. If by some freak happening one of the blogs suddenly disappeared from Google search results I would have the other still up and running while I found the issue and corrected it. Therefore having two hosting packages with blogs on each also means if one server goes down at my hosting company I have the other one up and running and if need be can move sites to the other package.

This is what I decided to do as a first step. I would move For No REal Reason to the other hosting site.

Make a copy of all the files for the site to my local computer
remove the URL from the hosting package
copy all the files to a directory on the other hosting site
Point the url to a directory on the other hosting site
Wait for the DSN to reset

It took about an hour to do these steps. I did move the image directory because it was small. I did not move the MYSQL database to the new hosting site. It was functioning fine. Yes you can have your blog database on one hosting package and your blog a different hosting package.

It worked. As a last resort I now knew I could move the main blogs to the other hosting site if need be.

Find the Block to the Gateway

I knew something was blocking access to the folders and since it wasn’t htaccess related it seemed logical to remove the index.php file from the root and see what would happen.

A little background is necessary. I did something I wouldn’t do again and should probably address in a post of its own. In short here is the issue which can cause problems.

The Site itself has orovalleyhomes4sale.com as the “home” url to which the hosting package is assigned. Since that URL is associated with the root, I installed the Oro Valley blog in the root. If I want to have another blog with its own dedicated URL I create a folder, copy the Wordpress files to that folder and install a new copy of WordPress. Because I use a custom permalink structure it can take some time for it to be recognized. But to date this has worked just fine

I backed up all the files in the root and deleted the index.php file and all the related blog files. Within 10 minutes all the other blogs came back up.

I reinstalled the Wordpress files in the root and the blogs all disappeared again. (Drat)

I started looking at the index.php files for all the blogs one at a time, then noticed something. The index.php file for Wordpress 2.6.1 was very different from the earlier versions. All the blogs including the new experiment blog had been updated to the latest version. HOWEVER, the blog on the root directory had not.

It took about an hour of trial and error but I finally was able to reinstall Wordpress in the root, leave out the index.php file, run an upgrade routine to the latest version. Copy the index.php file from one of the upgraded folders to the root directory and within 10 minutes all the blogs were back including the one in the root directory.

Time 9 pm.

This entire adventure started at 8:32 am just 12 1/2 hours before, in which time I had only aged a year. Yes I obsess and treat these blogs like they are my children.

So that’s the rest of the story, as far as it goes. I’m still going to combine the news blog and the Tucson AZ blog into a single blog. NO that isn’t putting all my eggs in one basket. I still have other blogs I write on other servers and in different hosting packages.

The next step will be once combined, quickly removing the duplicate pages such as Contact Us CMA request and Home Finder pages.

Then begins the process of 301 redirects for those posts to the Tucson AZ blog. I can hardly wait for the adventures that lie ahead.

Finally, since I’m closing in on 1000 words I thought I would throw in a picture which has nothing to do with this post.

Today I was the Lab Rat

By Dave Smith Monday August 25, 2008

It all started out as an early morning experiment that went horribly wrong and I learned more than I ever wanted to know about patience and URL resets. I’ll try and keep this short and break it into section. Yeah, I learned a lot today.

Combining Two Blogs into One

The experiment that went wild. I have decided after a lot of hesitation and hair pulling (which is getting thin) I wanted to combine the Tucson Real Estate in The News blog with the Tucson AZ Real Estate Blog. I write a lot of blog posts in the course of a month.

There has been less of a need to post to the news blog. At this point everyone knows there isn’t much good news or new in real estate and I want to post daily and fight depression doing it.

My issues.

How to bring over to the Tucson AZ Real Estate blog all the posts/pages/ and comments from the Tucson News blog.
How do I create an htaccess file with the 301 redirect code that will be needed so these posts can be found by the search engines.
How to notify everyone that has linked to the Tucson News blog it was going dormant and if they are willing shift their link to the Tucson AZ blog.

The first step was to create a new test database to try and integrate the two blogs. I initially thought I could use the MYSQL database upgrade routine to accomplish this but soon found out the files were to large. I decided to use the Export function under the Manage tab in 2.6.1. It exported all posts/pages/comments/ etc to a new file. I did this for both blogs. I set up the new blog and imported both sets of files. It took almost no time and I had both blogs integrated. Step one was a huge success.

Then the lab rat (that would be me) took it one step further. I thought it would be nice to attach the Tucson AZ blog to the newly created Database containing both sets of files. It went downhill fast from that point.

I realize soon the internal url structure for that database pointed to the location of the test blog. I couldn’t just point to it in the config file like I could when I did it from the server using the MYSQL routine I described before. Since I had set up a blog the url was inside that database file different than using the other method. It didn’t like that and I switched it back.

I had the database, I knew it could be done experiment over. I deleted the test directory using my FTP program and just like that all the blogs on that hosting site disappeared. I couldn’t get to the admin panel, I couldn’t get anywhere. In the past if this happened (YES IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE) I just renamed the htaccess file so it couldn’t be found and waited a few minutes for things to reset. This time they didn’t.

I called GoDaddy support which has helped me through similar issues a couple of times over the years which usually resulted in renaming the htaccess file. This time they said it might have been something in the directory I had deleted, but the server was fine, They could point to the welcome.html and it would come up, it was just those dynamic php files that were the issue and according to “Scott” that was “My Problem”. Yeah.

I learned I can combine two blogs into one. I haven’t addressed how to handle the 301 redirect from the old News blog to those integrated posts in the Tucson AZ blog. Anyone with this kind of experience, I”m all ears. I know I can do each of the 255 posts in 14 categories by hand, but “PLEASE Somebody Help The Boy”.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you the rest of the story. All the blogs are back up live, all the blogs have been upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1 and functioning nicely (Fingers Crossed) Here is a hint at what else I learned while trying to figure out how to recover from this.

I learned how to move a blog url from one hosting site to another and bring it back up live. That is good to know how to do.

I learned not to upgrade a blog living in a folder as a sub directory to a higher version of WordPress than the version on the root drive.

Oh Yeah, I was a big time Lab Rat today. More on this Rats adventure tomorrow. I hope you sleep well tonight, I’m at least going to be able to sleep.