Zwinkyness

Since this is actually a website update, there is no doubt in my mind that you guys will adore me afterwards. Hopefully. Unless you liked the previous layout better. However, I had some trouble with that layout: first of all, it was not widget-ready, secondly the nav bar was too small and third but not least, I wanted another navigation area below the content. For which I have my very own purposes, which will come clear when it’s done. Soon.

You might have not noticed it or my latest article was not that good of a hint as it seemed to me, but I have been doing a lot of work behind the screens of the website. First of all, I updated my WP Installation to the latest version (which I believe is 2.3.2) but said installation did not go without any troubles. Quite frankly, the entire WP installation crashed. However, I was able to put a backup of my database back in the running, discovered the wonderful way out of the PHP memory problem (as explained in my latest article) and was able to upload a couple of other plugins I wanted to install on here.

For starters, my weblog is now protected by one of the most powerful anti-Spam protection out there: an ingenious triangle featuring Akismet, Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour. If anything gets through now, then I don’t know anymore Secondly, behind the scenes something major is coming up. Just give me a couple of more days to get it all running and then…surprise surprise! Hint: It is book-related. Now, that might have spoilt all the fun of the surprise (in case you’re smart enough to figure it out) but I don’t really like surprises anyway, so…

Another thing is that now, in my sidebar, you can find links to the recent posts and recent comments. This helps you to navigate quicker (or so I hope…) I was wondering if you guys would like Related Posts to appear in the navbar too, or if you would think it would clutter things up. Please just post your opinion by answering to this post. Thanks

One last things, here’s a list of a bunch of stuff you are allowed to know that will be up/fixed soon (since some things went wrong when uploading the new theme, but only slightly)

• Update all H1 and H2 tags in pages, so the weird headings no longer appear.
• Install Footnotes plugin (finally have to get into that one!)
• Install Flickr Stream Plugin
• Make optional to subscribe to the weblog, for people who either dislike RSS Feeds or simply enjoy reading their mail. (Possibly use Plugin Subscribe2)
• Create register page
• Recheck Accessibility of website (and valid coding)
• Open up new surprise section (WOOHOO!!!!)
• Write following tutorials: 1) Making a guestbook in WP (hopefully actually getting to make one myself) and 2) The Spam Triangle: Why it is effective and 3) Why (Math) Questions are useless when it comes to battling SPAM.
• Install Gravatars Plugin (I love Icons!)

For now, that’s all I could think of, but I’m sure that if I tried hard enough, I would be able to think of some more, heh. Anyway, I’m off now since I still have some homework (French. YUCK.) and I’m hoping to comment back on some people’s website, who commented recently on here. Also, Bones starts in a couple of minutes, which is of course the primary reason for me finishing this post quickly.

So, some of you might remember the little accident that used to happen with my Spam Karma 2 plugin, causing commenters to receive a message, somewhat along the lines of: Fatal Error = Memory Exhausted (tried to locate … bytes) etc. Little did I know this problem had to do with the initial memory size set by my host for scripts. And it was only till last night, when I upgraded WordPress and kept receiving the same error all over again, that I was able to find out what exactly was going on.

Cpanel’s PHP Settings helped me out a lot. Apparently, 8 MB by default was given to host a script; meaning that if any script (and a WP-based website is basically one big script) crossed the maximum limit, it would display the message I received lately. Now, after some digging around on the WP Help website, I figured out how to solve the problem. Since I hope this small article might help other people with the same problems, I shall explain it to you.

One tip given on the WP Forum was: create a .htaccess file and display a certain code in it. This totally failed, because the only result was a 500 Internal Server Error. So, I would advice you not to use this method.

The only thing that helped from me (since trying to create my own php.ini file messed up terribly too) was adding the following code in my cache.php (nested under /wp-includes/cache.php) right underneat the beginning <? php tag.

ini_set(’memory_limit’,'32M’);

I set the value to 32 M for safety (I do not want this error to come up again!) However, if you feel like it, you can also set it to 16 M or whatever value you want (although it is probably best if you choose one higher than the one you already have, which is in most cases 8 MB).

Now, to give you another last example of how your cache.php should look like now (the top part):

ini_set(’memory_limit’,'32M’);
function wp_cache_add($key, $data, $flag = ”, $expire = 0) {
 global $wp_object_cache;
 $data = unserialize(serialize($data));

return $wp_object_cache->add($key, $data, $flag, $expire);
}

I hope you all enjoyed this small article and I hope it was helpful to some people. I know it is short, but why make it long and complicated if you can make it easy?

Hehe. Well fine, I’ll admit it. It took me another four days to blog again. Yes, I’m bad, evil, horrible and whatnot but here I am…finally. Anyway, I just fixed the comment error Valerie was talking about earlier (apparently it had something to do with my Spam Karma 2 database), but unfortunately did not manage to do any other updates yet. Kill me.

Thuesday evening, myself and four school mates went to a play. It was great, although a bit short.  The title of the play was Una Giornata Particulare. It was based on a quite successful movie directed by Ettore Scola. Basically, the story line is quite simple: on the day Adolf Hitler meets up with Mussolini, an italian housewife meets her next door neighboor. The two get along quite well (the housewife, Antonietta, desperately craves for love and the man, Gabrielle, needs a friend in sad times) but when Antonietta tries to kiss Gabrielle, all hell breaks loose. He confesses that he is in fact, a homosexual. Eventually, Antionetta, still somewhat in love with him, forgives him for not telling her right away and they ‘restart’ their relationship. Eventually, Gabrielle leaves because he thinks that is the best thing to do, leaving Antionetta alone, sad, misunderstood and desperate. The ending is very harsh and sad, but the play as a whole was cheerful and funny. It was moving, touching and innocent in all its venom. Although it was a bit short (only lasted for about an hour) I enjoyed it.

Afterwards, the five of us went to have a little drink. It was very nice, funny and well, plain hilarious even. It is nice to be able to go out with friends, having the time of your life and not having to worry about anything. I wish I could do that more often. Wedsneday was a rather depressing day. School sucked as usual, we had tons of homework and we had to practise the play we need to perform in french. Took us the whole bloody afternoon. Afterwards, I had Spanish class, but that did not really cheer me up either.

I hate winter. I hope the sun returns soon, because this cold, freezing temperatures and these ubershort days make me tired and depressive. I suspect I might be getting ill too, and emotionally seen winter is not always that good for me either. It gives me rather depressing thoughts, which are hard to surpress. Anyway, I found some stuff that helps so you might try it out too if you feel like you have the winter blues.

1. Have a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. It warms you up inside.
2. Take a hot bath, preferably put some candles on the bath tub and turn off the lights, to make it all the more romantic. The water must be warm and you need a lot of bubbles to get in the right mood for relaxing and clearing your thoughts.
3. Do yoga or meditate. It really helps.
4. Go for a walk outside, preferably in a forest or something. Bring a camera along, so that, if melancholy strikes after all you can enjoy yourself by taking pictures. If you have a pet, take it as company.
5. Draw, paint or write your feelings of depression out. Express your feelings through art.

Well, that’s all for now, folks. Expect an entry entitled: “Self-Pity: a true teenager disaese?” soon, because that is something working on my nerves for quite some time now. Also, you might get to see the results of my latest English assignment within a couple of days. Enjoy yourselves till then and lots of love and hugs. (Wow, cheesy!)