Archive for April, 2007

No more wp-cache • 16

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I’ve had it with wp-cache. Everytime I enable it on this blog bad things happen. When I released Redoable 1.1, it got posted on weblogtoolscollection.com, and on Smashing Magazine and I got mountains of traffic very quickly. I didn’t have wp-cache installed at the time, an despite receiving about 10 times more traffic than a normal day my blog was relatively ok. Despite this I followed a couple of peoples advice and installed wp-cache….you know….just in case.

Over the next week or so my site crashed a couple of times, according to Dreamhost some was my fault ( ? ) and some was due to downtime of their servers. Then things got really bad. The first week of March my site was gone. Nothing I did would bring it back. I disabled every plugin, and then I deleted them, and then I went back to the default theme….nothing, Dreamhost couldn’t help, and I was lost for ideas. After being down for almost a week I had a brain snap, “what if I delete the cache files produced by wp-cache”, and guess what….my site came back. It would appear that something was corrupted and was killing my site. Goodbye wp-cache (attempt 1).

So I de-activated wp-cache, afterall that “should” be all you need to do to stop a plugin, right? Wrong. It was still caching files (and periodically killing my blog, wtf?). Apparently you have to disable it AND then deactivate it. Stupid…oh how stupid.

Skip forward about 6 or so weeks and it was time for me to released Redoable 1.2. I did that on the night of the 25th, and about an hour after I posted the update, I thought I’d give wp-cache another go (afterall, surely my experience last time was random, and wouldn’t be repeated). I went to the wp-cache site and downloaded the lastest version, then I installed it….everythine was ok, or so it seemed.

So last night almost exactly 24 hours after I installed, activated and configured wp-cache, guess what happened. Yes, my blog shat itself again. Thing was I was asleep and didn’t find out about it until this morning, so my site was down for 8 hours, really quite pissed off about that.

Instead of the usual disable plugins one by one routine, I went straight to the cache folder thats used by wp-cache and blew the files away….guess what. My site instantly came back. Damn you wp-cache thats the last chance. I will never be using it again, I don’t care what people say about it, but quite obviously something about my site just doesn’t like it.

Wp-cache is gone, disabled, deactivated, deleted. Good riddance.

Note: Yes I deliberately linked to just about every site that was related EXCEPT the wp-cache site. It just doesn’t deserve the link. Yes I am bitter.

Filed under: Plugin 16 Comments

Redoable 1.2 - Here now! • 41

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Filed under: Redoable 41 Comments

iNinja • 5

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iNinja

iNinja, originally uploaded by deanjrobinson.

Playing around in Illustrator, came up with this parody of an iPod ad. Why? Because Ninjas AND iPods are cool.

Filed under: Flickr 5 Comments

Three little icons • 2

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanjrobinson/466016073/

threelittleicons.png

I needed a break from my assignments, so I thought I’d fix up the little things I wasn’t happy about with my Twitt-Twoo icon.

With a redesign in the works I thought I’d slap together a couple of other icons that I might use in the new site.

The middle one is a flickr icon that I’ll probably use to link to my flickr feed, and the third one is just a bit of fun to see what my new logo looks like in ‘feed icon’ form.

The icons were created from Matt Brett’s original source files from feedicons.com.

Filed under: Design 2 Comments

Something new • 9

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Something new

Something new, originally uploaded by deanjrobinson.

Viva the revolution, I’ve finally joined Flickr! And to celebrate this mediocre moment in my online life, I’m going to share a screenshot of something that I’ve been working on in between work, uni, Twitt-Twoo and Redoable.

Yes, this could very well the first look at where I’m taking this site over the next couple of months. Since Redoable kind of exceeded even my wildest dreams with the number of downloads that its had in the past 4-ish months. Its just passed 12,000 overall and is nearing 10,000 for version 1.1 alone. Wow.

But, this means that my blog is no longer unique, and as much as I love Redoable, I’m most likely going to switch to something that will be unique to my site. And this is just the first glimpse of the forthcoming unique-ifying.

Don’t worry Redoable fans, version 1.2 is still coming. You just can’t rush these things.

Filed under: Flickr 9 Comments

Twitt-Twoo v1.1 released • 15

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As mentioned a couple of days ago I’ve been working on an update to Twitt-Twoo. Its nothing ground-breaking, but hopefully some of the changes that I’ve made will make it a little more ‘friendly’ to use.

First up there have been a few changes to the code, mainly to incorporate some of the recent changes to the Twitter API, including the deprecation of ‘relative_created_at’ from the feeds. To overcome this I’ve used a modified combination of a couplef of the scripts posted in the Twitter fan wiki. There wasn’t a php version listed, so I adapted the javascript one. Works nicely.

The other big change is the addition of “caching”. Its not like Alex King’s Twitter Tools, in that it doesn’t store a record for all your tweets, all I’m doing it simply storing the latest tweet and its time in the wp options table. For more details about this have a read of my previous post.

The last lot of changes were to remove the need for you to manually enter your twitter id number, and the url for your twitter profile image. Both are now sucked out of the feed the first time that you update. I have also incorporated a request to add and option to allow you to turn your Twitter image on or off.

As always, if you have any troubles, or if you’ve got any suggestions then just leave a comment here, or swing by the support forum and leave a message there.

For more details, and installation tips visit the Twitt-Twoo homepage.

Download Twitt-Twoo 1.1 Now!
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Twitt-Twoo Support Forum

Filed under: Plugin 15 Comments

Caching my tweets • 2

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Originally I had planned (and hoped) that the simplistic nature of Twitt-Twoo would be a good thing. But due to the rising poularity of Twitter in general it seems that going off and requesting my current status everytime a page loads is not particularly good.

Sure its fine when the Twitter service is ok, but it is frequently “delayed. And due to the position I have Twitt-Twoo in, this “delay” stops the rest of my sidebar loading until it finishes doing it magic. I had a suggestion just after I first launched Twitt-Twoo, to perhaps implement some sort of cahcing to reduce the need for the Twitter feed to be access every time a page is loaded.

So over the past few days (well, when I wasn’t spending stupid amounts of time at work over the weekend) I have been working on implementing this ‘caching’ idea. I think its almost there, but I will hold off releasing it until I’m happy with it, which hopefully should be too long.

The method I am using involves storing the latest ‘tweet’, the time for that tweet, and the last time twitter was checked. Now when the plugin loads, it checks the ‘last checked’ time and if it was less than 10 minutes ago it just pulls out the status and time from my Wordpress db. If its been longer than 10 minutes, then it goes off (server side) and updates the latest tweet in the database etc.

I’m using the updated version right now, so I would like any feedback regarding load times, andwhether or not you still notice that the sidebar “freezes” because its waiting forTwitt-Twoo. Providing I don’t come accross any major problems, and the general feedback is good I will try and get Twitt-Twoo 1.1 released by the end of the week.

Filed under: Plugin 2 Comments
Socialized through Gregarious 42