VT’s Tech Blog

Ever since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.9, I’ve been having a problem in the scheduled posts in Wordpress. Everytime I set a post to be scheduled in the future, it used to miss the scheduled time and never get posted. When I checked the status of these posts in the posts admin area, each of these posts had the status “Missed Schedule” next to them.

There were some blog posts on the net asking me to get some file from the older version of Wordpress and copy it over, but I wasn’t too comfortable doing that, in case that broke anything in the new version of Wordpress. After a lot more digging I found a solution which fixed the problem using a minor edit in wp-includes/cron.php, where a timeout was set to too small an amount, causing the cron to timeout before the posts are actually published.

To fix this problem, you need to edit the cron.php file which is present in the wp-includes folder. Open the file in your favorite text editor and head over to line 229 (in Wordpress 2.9, the exact line number may change depending on your version). Look for the following line:

wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

Change that line to increase the timeout to 20 so the line should look like this:

wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 20, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

Remember that you’ll have to make this change manually with each update to Wordpress till they fix this issue – it seems the same issue is present from Wordpress 2.7 onwards and triggers when the server is slow to process the cron.php file. Update: It seems it’s a bug which triggers due to a certain version of PHP’s Curl extension on the server, and will be fixed in the 2.9.1 maintenance release (via)

If you are uncomfortable going and editing this file to fix the problem, you can also try out this plugin which should work for you – Scheduled MIAs plugin.

tip via

I just came across this S60 freeware today which allows me to manage my wordpress blog on my E71. Wordmobi is a Python app which can be used to perform the following tasks on the blog:

• Create and publish new posts (with basic HTML formatting)
• Include  images from the phone or a remote URL into the posts
• View and approve comments on the posts
• Delete Posts

Before going and installting WordMobi, you’ll have to install Python for S60 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=154155

After you install Python, you can go ahead download the latest version and install WordMobi. Before you can start  managing your blog, you’ll have to setup the app with your wordpress details. Here’s how to do that:

Open WordMobi, select your access point then click on Options > Settings > Blog Access

Once in the blog access screen, you’ll have to enter the following information:

• URL to your Wordpress blog. For my blog, I entered: http://blogs.vinuthomas.com
• Username – the administration username you use to login to your blog
• Password
• The number of recent posts you would like to download
• The number of recent comments to download

Once your settings are in, all you need to do is to update the posts, and you’ll get the recent posts down into your phone for you to edit.To update the posts, select Options>Posts>Update

This app should work on any S60 3rd Edition phones like the E71 orN95 (according to the WordMobi Site). If you get this working on other phones, do let me know. Also if you can’t seem to connect using this, see if your xmlrpc.php file is accessible on your blog url (http://yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php). For me this file was disallowed on the server because the server I’m on had some wierd restriction placed on the xmlrpc file.

Links: WordMobi Project Site, WordMobi download, Python for S60 download

Here’s a how-to from AskApache.com which shows you how to improve the delivery of your Wordpress blog. The article oulines a few hacks to the WP-Cache plugin to improve the cachability of Wordpress. After the Wp-Cache hacks they go on to give you a few lines which you can add to your .htaccess file which

• Set the a future expires headers which Apache sends out to the browser while serving content
• Disabled ETag headers
• Removes last modified Header
• Adds cache control headers

These quick hacks ensures that the browser keeps the downloaded files ( htmls, css, images,..) and pulls them from cache next time to improve the speed at which your blog displays to the users.

Head over to the article and get started with your hacks: Hack WP-Cache for Huge Speed Increase

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Matt’s just announced the latest release of Wordpress:

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,� named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

More details on the latest release at the Wordpress Blog: WordPress 2.6

Here’s a video which shows a quick tour of Wordpress 2.6:

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a new addon called Zementa for Firefox, which suggests content for your blog as you create your posts. This plugin currently works for Wordpress (hosted and self-hosted), Typepad and Blogger. The content suggested by Zementa are all copyright cleared so you don’t have to go trolling for content and licence issues for your blog.

I’ve installed this on my blog to see how it works, and the suggestions given by this seem to be pretty good. It adds new sidebars to the Wordpress Edit post screen for the sugestions presented.

In this article image on the right,  the in-article links and the related article links below are all from Zementa’s plugin.

Link: Zementa
Download Zementa

Here’s a cool wordpress plugin which updates your twitter account whenever you create or update  a post on your Wordpress blog. You can configure the plugin to send a twitter when you – create or edit a new draft, publish your post or edit any old posts.

Link: http://blog.victoriac.net/blog/twitter-updater