Message to WordPress Plugin Developers: Use the WordPress Plugin Repository!

This message is for all of the WordPress plugin developers out there.

Use the WordPress plugin repository dammit!

Reasons to use the WordPress plugin repository:

1. It is free
2. It gives your plugin a lot of exposure
3. It isn’t dependent on your crappy $5.95/month hosting
4. It provides real download links that can be used with wget and not those annoying download counters
5. The WordPress software will allow the blog owner to see that there is an update to your plugin
6. It will work with the WordPress auto updater

Now stop only providing download links on your site and publish your plugins in the WordPress plugins repository!

Let me put it this way…The next time I am looking for a plugin and I find yours, and it is not hosted in the WordPress plugin repository, I am taking your code, publishing it in the WordPress plugin directory and I wont acknowledge you as the author!

I’m tired of using outdated WordPress plugins because it wasn’t hosted where it should be and I wasn’t notified that an update was available, and come to find out that it wasn’t even working!

And yes I am using a lot of exclamation points! It’s because I am pissed!

LinuxWorld Expo 2008 San Francisco

I’ll be attending the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco at the beginning of August. I’ll be arriving mid way through the conference so that I can attend to my sons first birthday and celebrations.

I’ll be attending the exhibit hall and keynote addresses on Wednesday and Thursday (Aug 6 + 7), as well as Ubucon and flying back out on Friday. To those reading this who will be out there for the conference, maybe we will run into each other.

Getting Lighttpd, FastCGI and PHP working on CentOS 4

Over the years I have been installing Lighttpd from the RPMforge repository on my CentOS 4 servers for high traffic sites. The one thing that bothers me time and again is that installing lighttpd, lighttpd-fastcgi and PHP; configuring lighttpd.conf to enable FastCGI and configuring FastCGI for PHP isn’t all that is required. Try doing only that and starting Lighttpd. It will die immediately all the while telling you that it started successfully.

The problem is that the default configuration for FastCGI + PHP in lighttpd.conf tries to place the PHP sockets into /var/run/lighttpd/ which doesn’t exist.

Only 2 quick steps are required to finish the installation and configuration:

1. mkdir /var/run/lighttpd

2. chown lighttpd. /var/run/lighttpd

Now fire up Lighttpd and enjoy the wonderful world of PHP on a web server that doesn’t suck.

Side Note: For those of you who are trying to find the location of php-cgi on your PHP 4.3.9 install from the base or updates CentOS repo, you aren’t going to find what you are looking for. Uninstall PHP 4.3.9 and install PHP 5.1.6 from the centosplus repo.

CheckGmail Problem With Google Hosted Domains

For some time now I have been using CheckGmail to monitor both my gmail.com accounts and my sivel.net accounts. But several months ago Google changed the way that accounts are authenticated for hosted domains.

If you are experiencing this problem I suggest downloading the most recent version of CheckGmail from the CheckGmail subversion trunk. For those of you who don’t have subversion installed or for those of you who don’t know how to use subversion there is any easy way around this.

Simply issue the following command:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/checkgmail http://checkgmail.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/checkgmail/checkgmail

If you currently have CheckGmail running kill it and restart it. Now you will be able to monitor your hosted domain again with CheckGmail.

Users from the Future Accessing Websites

This morning at GMT 03:39:23 a user from the future accessed a website running on one of the servers that I manage at work.

There was a date timestamp in the HTTP request of “Wed, 34 Apr 3119 26:46:54 GMT”.

Not only does this prove that users from the future are browsing our sites but it also proves that some time in the future we will add extra days into the calendar and add extra hours into the day.

Apparently time travel is possible. Bravo Doc Brown.

I have a feeling that Apple is behind this. While there are numerous requests during that time period, one of those hits came from a browser using the Webkit rendering engine. And Apple has created a piece of software called “Time Machine”. I think that the “Time Machine” software and the Webkit rendering engine are running a Delorean. Now to find out where they got their “Flux Capacitor” from. And plutonium…Damn these guys at Apple are serious.