Month: June 2014

1&1 woes

Well, it appears that the reason my site has been really slow for a couple of days is due to a problem at 1&1. They acknowledged the issue on Twitter yesterday:

Hopefully, they can get it resolved soon. Meanwhile, I guess I should take a break from messing with this site, and maybe go outside and get some exercise! (Too bad it’s been raining all week.)

UpdraftPlus Backup and other WordPress stuff

I finally got around to installing a backup plugin. After looking at a few possibilities, I settled on UpdraftPlus for now. The free version does scheduled backups, with e-mail notification, of both the database and the file system. For now, I’m just backing up to the local file system on my web host, but at some point I’ll try sending them to Google Drive or DropBox, both of which are possible with this plugin.

It looks like the free version will do everything I need it to, but if I want to switch over to the premium version, it’s $60, with one year of support and updates. Subsequent years are discounted a bit. Oh, and I should really try doing a restore, from my production site to my test site, just to make sure those backup files really work. (I have enough IT experience to know that I can’t assume that those files aren’t just filled with zeroes…)

One another front, I recently turned on the site monitoring feature in Jetpack. Based on the reports I’ve gotten over the last couple of days, my site apparently goes down more than I realized. I’ll have to keep an eye on it for a while, and see if this is an anomaly, or if 1&1 is just not as reliable as I thought. Or it may just be that my home page sometimes takes more than ten seconds to load, which is a separate problem. (Though I’d think the Jetpack monitor should be getting the static cached version of the page, which should load pretty quickly.)

And speaking of slow load times, the WordPress admin on my site is still working pretty slowly most of the time. I know I can’t fix that with caching, and I’m not sure what I can really do about it. I guess I can deactivate some plugins and see if there’s a particular plugin causing the slowdown. Using SSL might be contributing to the problem, but I don’t want to turn that off. So I guess I’ll do some research and some experimenting over the next few days. Fun!

AX 2012 list pages: missing the obvious

I spent an embarrassingly long time today trying to solve a problem in AX that was pretty simple, once someone pointed out the obvious answer to me. Just in case anyone else is looking for the same thing (and for the amusement value), I thought I’d write it up.

A list page in AX 2012 always has a drop-down in the upper right, allowing you to filter the grid by one of a number of fields. I was asked to add a new field to the list of available fields. This didn’t seem like it should be a big deal. Now, I haven’t done much work specifically with list pages. But they’re still basically AX forms, and I’ve done plenty with “regular” AX forms. Going into the list page form definition, I couldn’t find anything that looked like a control for that drop-down. It just seemed to appear magically. I found a blog post explaining how an individual user can add a new field to the drop-down, but nothing on how a programmer could add a field to it for all users.

Until someone pointed out to me that the list of fields in the drop-down corresponded exactly to the list of fields in the grid below it. So the drop-down is basically just a way to filter on any individual field in the grid. So the answer, of course, was just to add the field to the grid.

Oh, and there’s one other oddball thing about list pages that I figured out a few weeks ago, after a similarly long amount of time banging my head against the wall. List pages can be used by both EP (Enterprise Portal) and via the regular AX client. So if you need to, for instance, override the “clicked()” method on a button on a list page, you need to change the display target from “auto” to “client” before AX will let you do that. (See this blog post for details.) I guess this isn’t a good idea if you’re using EP, but we’re not, so, in my case, it’s OK.

WP Super Cache

So after seeing 10-20 second load times on my home page (via http://tools.pingdom.com), I decided that I really needed to install a caching plugin. So I went with WP Super Cache, as that seems to be well-supported and stable. So far, it’s working fine, and page load times are down to 2-3 seconds, which is much better.

Somehow, the idea of using a plugin to generate and serve static pages seems like a step backwards to me, but I guess if it’s well-written and intelligent about regenerating the static pages when needed, then it’s fine. I know I can’t expect WordPress to run at top-speed in a shared hosting environment, but I was surprised to see how slowly stuff was running.

Oh, and I have seen a slowdown in the speed of the admin pages since I switched them to SSL. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can do about that, short of moving to a faster environment or turning off SSL.

a long walk

walk-20140608

I managed to go out for an hour-long walk today, which is probably the longest walk I’ve done this year. I did a couple of walks yesterday too, but not one long one.

I’ve managed to get into the habit of going for a 15 or 20-minute walk almost every day, after lunch, in the parking lot at work. (It’s a big lot.)

Between that, and some longer walks on the weekends, I think I’m doing OK on maintaining a reasonable level of physical activity. Still quite a way from my doctor’s recommendation that I walk for a full hour every day, but not bad, right?

Criminal

So, after having some thoughts about doing something interesting this weekend, I seem to have wound up doing very little today. I went out for a walk in the morning, and then spent some time installing Windows 8.1 Update 1 (or whatever it’s called) on my ThinkPad, and reading comics.

Specifically, I’ve been reading Ed Brubaker’s Criminal. I read the first series, with “Coward” and “Lawless”, a few weeks ago, and now I’m reading volume 2. I have V2 #1-7 in single issues, which I bought when they first came out. (They’ve been in my to-be-read pile for quite a while.) I stopped buying new comics not long after they came out, so I’ll need to pick up the rest in trades or hardcover, or on Comixology or something. (The series is definitely good enough that I will be reading the rest of it!)

I remember reading some of Brubaker’s early work in Dark Horse Presents, years ago, and really loving it. This series reminds me of that stuff, but a lot more mature. (Not that his Captain America work wasn’t great too, but that’s a very different kind of thing.) And the essays on film noir in the back of each issue are pretty cool; I’ve added several books & movies to my Amazon wish list based on recommendations found in those essays. The artwork by Sean Phillips is also great; just perfect for this kind of story.

from Drupal to WordPress

As a guy with a good bit of Drupal experience, and a limited amount of WordPress experience, I’ve thought about writing up a little comparison & contrast essay for my blog. I just found this post from a guy who has a lot of Drupal experience, and is just getting into WordPress. I agree with most of what he’s saying here, and have definitely noticed some of the same stuff that he has. So now I guess I don’t have to write up that comparison/contrast post!

One note though: since I started using WordPress, I’ve been keeping an eye out for something similar to drush, the command-line tool for Drupal. Well, I stumbled across it today: WP-CLI. I’m not sure if it does quite as much as drush, and I’m also not sure if I’ll be able to get it working on my web host, but it looks useful.

too much to do this weekend

I just figured out that both AnimeNEXT and WordCamp Philly are happening this weekend. I kind of like the idea of checking out a WordPress gathering, and the Philly WordCamp would be relatively convenient. And I haven’t been to an anime convention in a few years, so it would be cool to drop in on AnimeNEXT and check it out. Maybe I can drive to Philly on Saturday and drop in on AnimeNEXT on Sunday? Of course, I need to fit my laundry and grocery shopping in there too somehow.