OMNINOGGIN

I apologize if you have visited earlier today and found the Maintenance-Mode screen. I was moving this blog from a self-hosted dedicated server to a shared-hosting server. In this post, I will discuss the reasons for my decision and the switching experience.
Here are some reasons why I made the switch (Pros):

1. I’ve been getting more readers lately so my bandwidth was almost reaching capacity. Shared-hosting is the cheapest way to get decent burstable bandwidth.
2. I wanted to start focusing more on WordPress and less on FreeBSD. Making this switch will alleviate me from having to maintain/troubleshoot low-level system things, leaving me with more time to focus on WordPress development & discussion.

Read on…

Over the past few months, I’ve been meaning to create a staging WordPress blog that is an exact replica of my production OMNINOGGIN blog so I can test major feature changes before releasing them to my production site.  I have to admit that there are many other interesting things to spend time on (see also: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache and NowThen Photo Display WordPress Plugin) so I have been lagging at getting this task done.  Fortunately the WordPress 2.5 released was enough to motivate me to get this done.  My goal in this post is to provide a step-by-step set of instructions (or checklist) for getting this task done.  I run Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51a, and PHP 5.2.5 on a FreeBSD 7.0 machine that I have complete control over.  Keep in mind that these steps will vary depending on how your blog is configured.  It is a good checklist nonetheless so without further ado:

Read on…

I am a semi-fan of WP-Cache. On the good side, it reduces strain on apache by staticising WordPress pages. On the bad side, it messes with my site statistics and makes development hard (I always forget that the page I’m working on is being cached). I like my statistics, but what if I suddenly get a traffic storm? If my site gets dugg, there is no time to worry about statistics. I would need all the help I can get to serve pages efficiently. This is why WP-Cache should be off by default and automatically turned on during traffic storms. Read on…

Previously, I mentioned that I was not able to successfully send emails via sendmail. This functionality is quite useful because WordPress, among other things, uses sendmail to send emails to you when someone leaves a comment on your post. So it turns out that because most public mail servers (i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc) do not trust my “omninoggin.com” mail server domain, all messages I sent were refused. After hours of research, I found out that I can route my mail traffic through my internet service provider’s mail proxy (SBC Yahoo!) to get this to work. Read on…