Took me a while to figure out why websites were breaking in some pages, till I was finally able to figure out that Internet Explorer has a bug where it can handle only pages with under 30 CSS files. Anything above that and the page would go dead.

Don’t believe me? check Microsoft’s “All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied in Internet Explorer”

All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied. Occasionally, you may also receive the following error message:

The page you are looking for might have been moved or had its name changed.

If you use a network monitor tool to capture network traffic, you may notice that a TCP reset occurs when Internet Explorer is receiving the page. Internet Explorer then generates another POST request if the original request was a POST request. Or, Internet Explorer may send a GET request instead.

You’d think that Microsoft would fix such a bug, but looking at the Internet Explorer versions that are affected, the list starts back at version 4.0 and goes up all the way to the most recent version as of today – Internet Explorer 8. Brilliant.

If you’re developing Drupal based websites, 30 CSS files are nothing, especially with the more advanced themes and modules. It’s enough that you include the theme, views and panels to easily top this limit.

But, there are a few things that might help.

For one, the IE Unlimited CSS module saved me with the Drupal 6 installations.

In some cases, though not all, the built-in Drupal CSS aggregation/optimization may help (if it’s aggregated already, that is).

How to enable Drupal CSS file aggregation

1. Log in as your Drupal site’s administrator.
2. Go to the Administer » Site configuration » Performance page.
3. Check the Enabled checkbox for Optimize CSS .
4. Click the Save configuration button.

Another option, if you’re not in Drupal is using a CSS optimizer solution. Here’s from Nadeau Software’s list, and although they claim it won’t speed up by much, it might save you from IE.

CSS optimizers

Hand-editing CSS to make it more optimal is tedious. Instead, use a CSS optimizer application. Here's a few of the many available:

• Blumentals Software's CSS Toolbox (freeware)
• CSS Drive's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Michael Bianco's CSS Optimizer (freeware)
• Robson's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Lottery Post's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• CSS Tidy (freeware)
  • CleanCSS (freeware)
  • Code Beautifier (freeware)
  • CSS Formatter and Optimiser (freeware)
  • CSS Code Formatter and Optimizer (freeware)
  • ... and many more based upon CSS Tidy

It never ceases to amaze me how a serious company as big as Microsoft, with all the resources available to it, keeps getting the whole browser thing wrong. What’s even more remarkable, is that there are those among us who still use that thing.

WordPress sometimes has the most annoying little bugs. Ones that don’t get fixed in minor version updates, ones that developers don’t seem to care about much but they could drive you crazy.

WordPress 2.9 failed cron jobs and missed schedules are one such bug. This hasn’t started in WordPress 2.9. Searching for “missed schedule” with “Wordpress” keywords, you’re bound to find endless forum threads about that.

WordPress 2.9’s minor updates (upto WordPress WPMU 2.9.1.1) didn’t seem to take care of that.

And the fix is so simple – it consists of modifying the timeout in wp-includes/cron.php.

Approximately around the line number 205 change :

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 0.01, ' blocking' => false)); 

To 20 seconds:

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 20, ' blocking' => false)); 

The simplest solution, assuming you don’t want to tweak this by hand or worry about future bugs overriding your changes is use one of the useful plugins that would check for missed scheduled posts like “Missed Schedule”.

This has been reported … again and again… take a look at the WordPress bug tracker :

cron stopped working with standard configuration

Hi Guys,

After the update to wp 2.9 (from 2.8.6 where everything worked just fine) my cron-jobs stopped working. Looking inside the cron-array with crontrol http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-crontrol/ it looks like they are not executed at all. So I end up with all cron jobs waiting for execution (which seems to consume quite a bit of time on every page call). In crontrol this behavior is shown as all cron jobs have the execution status now.

I found the work-around in Otto's reply in this post http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296236which seems to work but produces dirty rewrites in the browser's address bar...

As my server configuration didn't change at all I assume that something else changed (e.g. could the statement Increase timeout on cron-based requests when checking for upgrades mentioned in http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9 be the reason?)

greetz, berny

More? here…

• WordPress 2.9: three bugs, and how to fix them
• 2.9 Schedule Posts "missed"
• WP-Cron not working in 2.9

Hope that helps.

We're happy to announce another feature to assist with managing duplicate content: parameter handling. Parameter handling allows you to view which parameters Google believes should be ignored or not ignored at crawl time, and to overwrite our suggestions if necessary.

If you’re not handling this through robots.txt, this is a great way to simply address duplicate content issues cause by parameters leading to duplicate pages that display the exact same content.

The option in GWT indicates :

Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example, http://www.example.com/dresses?sid=12395923 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/dresses. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs, while helping to ensure that the information you need is preserved. (Note: While Google takes suggestions into account, we don't guarantee that we'll follow them in every case.)

Since someone emailed me to ask - here are some of my suggestions for optimal SEO configurations. If you have others – I’m interested.

Gallery2

• g2_highlightId : Ignore
• g2_imageViewsIndex : Ignore

Drupal

• destination
• order
• sort

Google Custom Search

• as_q
• sitesearch

BTW – Yahoo’s Site Explorer has had a similar concept with Dynamic URLs (under Actions) for years.

Specify up to 10 dynamic parameters that you want us to treat specially whenever these are seen in URLs belonging to http://www.yourdomain.org . We will automatically rewrite the URLs containing these parameters as specified below. You can choose to:

1. Remove these parameters from the URLs, such as in case of session ids, you could ask to remove 'sid' from URLs.

2. Use a default value for the parameter, for example you could set the 'src' parameter to be 'yhoo_srch'

Around the beginning of 2010 I saw an explosion of lists with various recommended WordPress plugins :

• Best 16 WordPress Plugins For 2010
• The 15 Best WordPress Plugins to Use in 2010
• 75 Best WordPress Plugins That Make Bloggers Lives Easier
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
• Best WordPress Plugins to improve the Security of your Blog

These are okay, but there are a few plugins that can really help boost things up for you. Following are some of my favorite plugins and recommendations for 2010 :

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins

1. SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - The AllinOneSEO alternative.
2. SEO Super Comments – Index your comments as separate pages (thousands of added long tail pages).
3. HeadSpace 2 – Complete control over metas (overlaps with some of #1, complements #4, not recommended for WPMU)
4. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – All needed SEO tags (overlaps with some of #1, complements #3, not recommended for WPMU)
5. SEO Smart Links – ALinks reloaded. Auto internal and external linking
6. Hotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin – Make it easy to link to your photos.
7. WordPress Global Translator Plugin – Make translation pages of your blog in any language (thousands of added long tail pages with real added value for visitors).
8. SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin – Best 404 page possible.
9. WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin – Make the most of incoming traffic.

Speed plugins

• DB Cache Reloaded – Projekty – Using WPSuperCache? try this instead (not tested on WPMU).
• WP Minify WordPress Plugin – Optimize JS and CSS files (not tested on WPMU).

Making money plugins

The only real way to make money blogging is direct advertising. This is the best no hassle direct advertising plugin I know:

• OIOPublisher (aff, I bought this plugin, if you do direct ads, you should too)

Happy 2010.

Cron has been running for over an hour and is probably stuck.

or

Attempting to restart Cron

That usually doesn’t leave you with much to work with, does it?

[UPDATE 05/09/2010 - I recommend installing the SuperCache module that will either take care of 90% of the problems or help you track down the probelm. This should quickly be integrated into core, if you ask me]

First thing to tackle this is try and get the cron unstuck and running. To do that, you can install the Devel module, goto the variable view, and delete the cron_semaphore variable that indicated a cron is already running. After flushing all cache you should be able to run cron again. Then, you might come across various types of the next strange message

MySql : " Warning: MySQL server has gone away "

Gone away where?

This indicates that MySQL is timing out. To tackle that you’d need to tweak MySQL a bit. Drupal has a great guide on that. Essentially, it’s opening your /etc/my.cnf and setting it to something that allows longer runs. Following is what I ended up with :

[mysqld]
skip-bdb
set-variable = max_connections=500
safe-show-database

Don’t forget to restart the server and after clearing the cron semaphore again rerun the cron. That should take care of things.

Too many WordPress sites? Consider migrating them all into one WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) site with the Multi Site Manager functionality to host one installation for multiple domain.

Why?

1. One installation and upgrading for core WordPress.
2. One installation and upgrading for plugins.
3. Domains are easily manageable.
4. Quickly setup a new WordPress installation in no-time. As easy as pointing the new domain to the install directory and configuring the Multi Site Manager plugin.

Need some help and general directions to get you started? Here are a few links and pointers.

1. It's highly recommended that you atleast get yourself a VPS that you could play around with (WHM and shell access). I use Hostforweb and VPS.NET.
2. Install WPMU
3. Need to set "No wildcards for local hosts file"
   1. Locally - Need to add every test domain by hand. 
   2. DNS changes.
   3. Setting up the WHM
      1. Your hosts file is usually under /etc/hosts
      2. Your httpd.conf  is usually under  /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
      3. Follow the directions on this comment.
4. I prefer the sub-domains option – installation has to be in the main directory.
5. Configure Domain mapping
   1. Multi Site  Manager (the option I use)
      1. Guide on getting Multi Site Manager to work on WPMU.
   2. Domain mapping plugin
      1. Tutorial on setting things up.
   3. Doing it by hand (God knows why, I recommend against this unless you know what you're doing).
   4. In case you run into trouble with repeated redirection loops or you're not able to login to the mapped domain - recreate the mapping, reset ALL permissions.
6. Plugins - some WordPress plugins work as is on WPMU. General comments about plugins that work for basic functionality
   1. Sitemaps
   2. Google Analytics
   3. Headspace2 didn't work well, applied All in One SEO.
7. Then - migrate your WordPress sites into the WPMU
   1. Importing categories - use the OPML of your WordPress blog with  http://youroldblog.com/wp-links-opml.php with the import option in your new blog.
   2. Export your posts and comments and import to the new blog. 
8. Redirect to the new domain - set .htaccess with the following

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on

Did it a few months ago with and have since enjoyed effortless maintenance and new blog setup. Have helped a few friends use this method with their setups. Hope this helps somewhat.

Good luck.

In Facebook, the one Facebook application that seems to do it right is Social RSS (formerly RSS-Connect). In the settings, add your blog name and RSS address, set your "Display Options" and in Newsfeed make sure you grant access and set the feed to "Yes".

If you want to do it through your WordPress blog, try the Wordbook plugin.

This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook "Boxes" tab will show your most recent blog posts.

If you're looking for a plugin that does the opposite, taking your facebook updates and posting them on your blog, take a look at the  Facebook Posted Items plugin. If you're looking to combine all sorts of feeds from different social websites, I strongly recommend Lifestream.

The option I dislike the most is using the Facebook notes option. Following are a few posts on how to do that. I recommend against it (posts old entries, ugly display, no batch remove etc.) :

• How to Import Your Blog Into Facebook
• Facebook: Importing a RSS Feed as Notes

BTW - the Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin will allow your blog users to login using their facebook accounts (photo in post from their website).

After running it for a month I decided to uninstall. The reasons for that included the following :

1. Horrible SPAM management and comment moderation. There were still some issues in regards to how Intense Debate plays with the WordPress mechanism, and some comments just got lost.
2. Sync problems between WP and Intense. Some comments were published in WordPress but not in Intense Debate and vice versa. It seemed as though some would eventually sync somehow, but that would have been after a long delay and with no admin notification.
3. Admin comments URL link go to Intense Debate instead of to the blog. this one really bothered me alot, since it affected some of the other plugins that I was using, like "Top Commenters" which now saw me as just another user with an external URL. I wrote them about that and they claimed that they're considering adding that later on.
4. Disappearing comments. Sometimes comments would just disappear. I couldn't tell when and under what circumstances, they just did, and more than once. Needless to say just how frustrating that it.
5. Comment section not appearing in search engines. I've heard they've been working on that, but for some time Intense Debate had some SEO crawlability issues since it's using Javascript . The "noscript" tag that was used included only some if any of the comments and usually with some wrong parameters. Naturally, this also affects those browsing the web with Javascript turned off.

There are endless other posts out there with more reasons (example). Uninstalling Intense Debate is a breeze, I'll grant them that, but there things you might want to consider doing after that :

(1) Revert all admin comments back to your URL instead of Intense Debate. Open your PhpMyAdmin, select your WordPress DB, select "SQL" to run an SQL query and run your variation of the following :

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url=REPLACE(comment_author_url, 'http://intensedebate.com/people/myintensedebateusername', 'http://www.myblogurl.com');
 
UPDATE wp_comments SET user_id=1 WHERE comment_author_email='myemail@gmail.com';

(2) Remove all Intense Debate sidebar widgets

(3) Upgrade your theme to included threaded comments. If you're running WordPress 2.7 and above you can change your theme to have that functionality.

(4) Add AJAX. This next AJAX commenting plugin looks interesting and works for WordPress 2.7 (I'm not sure why the original homepage is dead).

(Photo from Asktheadmin.com)

Ingredients :

• Users to CSV is a useful plugin by Joost originally intended to start off your mailing list based on subscriber users or registered commenters, which you can consider if you're into creating a newsletter for your blog (and you should). For me, this was helpful in exporting the userbase to a CSV file.
• Import Users Plugin for WordPress is a small little plugin by Yoast that would allow you to import the users from a CSV. Though it does it job okay, I needed a slightly different thing, so I used a slightly modified version by Rodeworks.
• A CSV editor. I simply used Excel 2007. Check this help page if you're not sure how to import and export a CSV file with Excel (didn't lookit up too long, you might be able to find something nicer).

What to do :

• Activate the Users to CSV plugin and export your user base into a CSV.
• Activate the Import Users plugin and go to the import page.
• Open the exported CSV with a CSV editor.
• Change the columns to fit the specifications on the import page.
• Copy paste your adjusted CSV into the import page and import.
• You're done.

On some occasions, I've seen this need a bit of further role editing with the regular batch role assignment in the WordPress admin console.

Hope that helps. If you know of anything simpler, I'm interested.

The symptom was a change in the wp_options table reverting this :

a:63:{s:11:"robots.txt$";.......

to this :

a:63:{s:12:"robots.txt$";.......

Resulting in permalinks leading to 404 not found errors for all posts, pages and archives. This was only when the permalinks were the non-default type ("beautified permalinks"). The .HTACCESS file seemed in order. Then I found that this was the cause.

At the beginning I just switched it manually back, altering the table by using PHPMYADMIN, but every time she posted or saved something it would go back to the problematic code.

The problem, it seems, was caused by Magic Quotes and the only way to fix it is through changing the Magic Quotes value.

There are a number of ways you can do that. First, add this to the vhost settings :

magic_quotes_runtime = Off
magic_quotes_sybase = Off

Or you can also add this to the .htaccess :

php_flag magic_quotes_runtime Off
php_flag magic_quotes_sybase Off

Effect would be the same.

Problem was, my friend was running on a shared hosting with Anhosting so she couldn't touch the vhost and adding those flags to .htaccess resulted in 505 errors.

The way to solve this was :

I tried one more thing. It seems Anhosting allows changing some PHP variables by adding a PHP.INI file to the directory in question (http://help.midphase.com/support/questions.php?questionid=527) so I added a PHP.INI file with the following directive :

magic_quotes_gpc = Off

That seemed to do the trick. Apparently, this solves a number of other issues with WordPress 2.7 as well. Solution was posted on the relevant WordPress thread.