Web Development – Page 18

Houston, We Have A Problem : Part Deux

OK, an explanation on what went wrong with my WordPress installation yesterday night. First I’d like to apologize to fellow contributors of this blog for the inconvenience caused to them by a password reset which had to be done, since I had to do a clean install of WordPress.

I’ve been using WordPress version 2.6 till now, and recently (on August 15th), WordPress 2.6.1 was released which incorporates a few bug fixes. It’s not an ‘important’ update, but I still decided to go ahead with it. Now for the update itself, I could have done it manually – which is the general way to do it. However, GoDaddy (my hosting provider) does not allow SSH connections for shared hosting accounts like mine, so untarring and overwriting with the new files isn’t an option. The other route would have been to take the new install file, and overwrite using the GoDaddy web interface. Rather than doing all that, I generally use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin – which does exactly that. WP-AU is recommended by the WordPress Codex itself; in fact, functionality similar to WP-AU is scheduled to be incorporated into the WordPress 2.7 core by default.

I began my upgrade around yesterday night, and WP-AU reported that the upgrade had gone smoothly. I didn’t find anything amiss either. Soon, problems started cropping up. WordPress kept on logging me out of my account every few minutes, and kept asking me to log back in. Even more strangely, at certain times during login it kept on giving an ‘Incorrect username’ error – when the username was most certainly correct (stored in my Firefox profile). I thought it could be a browser cache / cookie issue, so I cleared those – still the problems persisted. I tried using Opera 9.50 instead of Firefox 3, and still the same thing. I even changed configuration files to force a cookie reset, but that didn’t work either. I disabled the Google Gears add-on for my blog, thinking that it might be causing the problem because it was pulling old files from its cache, but that didn’t work either. Heck, I couldn’t even see any posts on my site when I was logged in! Others who weren’t logged, could, but for me, it said I didn’t have enough permissions to view the post.

That’s not the only thing which was going wrong. It wasn’t allowing me to publish posts either, giving a ‘You do not have the permission to do that’ error. I checked the users page, and I was listed as an Administrator. I logged on to the WordPress IRC channel then, and discussed this issue with the helpful folk there. I overwrote the existing WordPress files manually with a fresh copy of v2.6.1 – still the problem persisted. Clearly, it was my database which had gone kaput – something which I feared from the beginning when the problem cropped up. I restored to a pre-2.6.1 database backup which I had, and ran upgrade.php again to update the tables. You guessed it right, that didn’t work either.

So I clearly had a problem with my user permissions. I elevated all existing members to administrator privileges, as a backup option in case I got locked out, and then created another admin account for myself. That new admin account also ran into similar problems soon. I tried to ‘reset’ my previous username’s permissions by downgrading its privileges, and then elevating it again to admin using my new account. Nope, that didn’t work either. During all this, I kept on getting logged out every few minutes.

I had no option other than doing a clean install. I exported my current items as a WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) files, and deleted my current install and database. I created a new database, did a clean install of WP 2.6.1, and then imported my data in using the XML file I’d exported earlier. Long night. So I’m back online now, re-uploading images using a backup I had taking earlier, and activating the old plugins I was using earlier one-by-one. Hopefully, I’ve a more stable WordPress install now.

As to what went wrong, I can only guess. Obviously, WP Automatic Upgrade screwed something up during the upgrade process. That’s a lesson to be learned – NEVER use WP-AU, manual upgrades might take longer, but it’s definitely safer.

The Need For Social Media

I was just reading some old computer magazine archives that I have, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the need for social media like blogs. Now many people dismiss blogs as trash where people get to rant, but I disagree. Take tech magazines and blogs for example. I was reading the PC World (India) website award stories online, and the one thing which really struck me was that none of the jury members seemed to be actual site members, who have a FEEL for what their service actually IS. It’s all OK to talk of which site looks good compared to some other site, but it doesn’t tell you a wetslap about ground realities. So for example, they can go on and on about how nice XYZ education site is, but they’re not the friggin’ students, are they? Nor could they ever match, say, Ankit Sud’s review of photo printing sites in India; simply because they never ORDERED prints from ANY of the sites in the first place! Only an actual user of the service who puts up his review can tell you how good it is in real life – that’s something any tech mag CAN’T do.

photo credit: MexicanwaveIt’s not just that – when considering tech product reviews, you’ll notice that that the quality of customer is never factored in, and yet it’s a very pertinent question. Only Apoorv Khatreja could tell you about current issues with Altec Lansing’s customer support, while the tech mags only comment on the copy they get to test on which. Which brings the other point – since most of the products they get for reviewing are not bought but given to them specifically for the purpose of reviewing, they are not necessarily impartial. You’ll notice that Indian magazines like Digit and Chip never have the gall to give a REALLY bad review about any product. Ones from foreign shores like PC World DO have a set of balls and occasionally tear a product apart, but still, the majority of their review end up giving 75-85% approval ratings – weird for real-world products. I’m not advocating magazines here, but just pointing out that tech magazines – or even blogs like Gizomodo or Engadget – may not like to bite the hand that feeds them (rather, gives them products to review). I’m not saying that they blatantly write advertisements, but that when they’re getting the products as a ‘favor’ rather than BUYING it, you tend to be sub-consciously partial towards the product. Something that a blogger review doesn’t have to face with.

That, and the fact that they use the product for a lesser period of time than someone who publishes to his blog. Only I could tell you that I dropped my LG phone from my first floor balcony, without any harm coming to the phone; or the fact that it’s predictive text input sucks. Not some tech reviewer who may have a few hours – or a day at max – to review a product which he hasn’t bought, but received as a ‘gift’. They simply don’t get enough time to tell about the lifetime of use a product undergoes!

That’s the power of Web 2.0. Getting to know stuff first-hand from people, people who are passionate about spreading their bit of knowledge to others.