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.

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.

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.

First, you’ll need to make a Google Custom Search. I’ve made one for the students, and you can take a quick look at the NCKU IIMBA student search and what a general results page would look like. It shows you all results but emphasizes a few websites that are important for students studying in NCKU-Tainan. A few possible search refinements were added (“Tainan”, “NCKU”, “Taiwan”, “IIMBA”).

Next step it to integrate the Google Custom Search to the WordPress blog. There are endless guides out there that explain it. Phutse does a good job with “How to incorporate Google Custom Search engine with Adsense into your WordPress blog" as does DoshDosh with “How to Set up Google Custom Search for Your Website and Make Money“. I’ve also added a Text widget on the side with the Custom search Javascript code. Width can be adjusted by playing with the Google Java code provided.

The next step was to make an auto-discovery OpenSearch XML file, so that the students can add this search to the browsers (Internet Explorer 7 and above,  Firefox 2 and above). Haacked does a good job explaining that one with “Integrate Your Custom Search Engine With The Browser”.

My XML file ended up looking like this :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<OpenSearchDescription
    xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>NCKU IIMBA Search</ShortName>
  <Tags>NCKU IIMBA INCKU students student </Tags>
  <Description>
    NCKU IIMBA search
  </Description>
  <Url type="text/html"
    template="http://iim.incku.com/search_result?cx=009510974112669170466%3Aoev8ebat7gw&amp;cof=FORID%3A11&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q={searchTerms}&amp;sa=Search&amp;" />
</OpenSearchDescription>

and that’s it, we’re done.

The more alarming one is that new service of Woopra that allows the site admin to get the most incredible collection of stats, actually see what's happening on the blog live and even start a conversation.

The feature itself isn't new, but how it comes up on the user side is a bit, eh, different from what I've seen so far. Here's an example from one of the sites.

The Webmaster says "hi". That's just great. The first time a blogger attempted to talk to me this way I was a bit confused. This is a neat little feature if you're the blogger, but I'm not so sure about the reader side.

In any case, this is an interesting direction for interactivity and communications between bloggers/web-admins and their users. It will take me a while to get used to it, on both sides, but aside from the obvious implications I can already see some great benefits.

Automatically take care of titles, meta-tags etc...

wpSEO

The Meta-Description is used by Google and other search engines to provide the description of a page. This is quite important - particularly since WordPress by default does absolutely nothing about it. wpSEO can generate post descriptions in a variety of ways, however in most cases it makes sense to cite the actual postings - automatically. If you’d like to be more precise, you can also provide a brief summary for Meta-Description manually.

or...

All-in-one-SEO pack

Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

with...

Meta Robots WordPress plugin

There's no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.

How about autotagging by Yahoo?

Autotag

The autotag plugin for WordPress leverages Yahoo's web services to automatically assign tags to your posts and pages.

Offer an efficient 404 page...

AskApache Google 404

AskApache Google 404 is a must-have WordPress plugin that uses some ajax and a couple tricks to display a very helpful and SEO Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.

Search Meter

Search Meter is a WordPress plugin that helps you keep your blog focused on what your visitors want to read. It does this by keeping track of what your visitors are searching for.

use it together with...

Nice Search

This is a really simple plugin that redirects your WordPress searches (?s=search-term) to the pretty-looking URI version: /search/search-term, and also converts spaces (%20) to plus symbols.

WordPress Plugin Tags Autolink

Tags Autolink automatically turns every tag name, when used in posts and pages, into a link to the same tag archive.

or do this kind'o thing manually with your leading keywords through...

aLinks

aLinks is a free WordPress plugin that takes a set of phrases you commonly use and turns them into links whenever you include them in a post, but really it’s much more than that!

this next one will also help boost Google Images traffic...

Random Image

...I decided to write a plugin to look for blog posts with images and return one image at random, linking back to its post.

or something else for Google Images...

SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool

SEO Alt Tag Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that enables a website owner to make optimum use of the Image ALT tags to improve the site’s search engine rankings through the effective utilisation of established and proven search engine optimization techniques.

Hopefully get more people to link to you by making it easier for them...

Link to Me Textbox

This is a WordPress plugin that will give you more links and higher rankings in the search engines.

Link to others (technorati and blog search recommended) ...

WordPress Link Optimiser

Link Optimiser will query Yahoo! Search for relevant web sites, Technorati, Google Blog Search and Yahoo Blog Search. for relevant blog post.

Hopefully, you were able to find a few SEO plugins you didn't before. Comments and suggestions are welcome.