Christopher Shennan's Blog

Over the last month or so I have been busy migrating my sites from my old shared hosting to a new server in the Rackspace Cloud and it has not been without it troubles. The first site I transferred was my WordPress blog and after following various resources on setting up Nginx and spawning PHP FastCGI processes I managed to get everything up and running happily… or so I thought.

As it turns out I had followed the guide for spawing PHP FastCGI processes to the letter, and that is where the problem lay.  After a few weeks WordPress reported there were various plugins that needed upgrading but I could not do the automatic upgrade and I had trouble uploading new files due to the wrong permission being applied.  After some investigation this lead me to realise that I needed to spawn my PHP FastCGI processes as the unprivileged user the files belonged to, and not nginx as in the original documentation.
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Over the last few weeks I have been working on my first wordpress plugin and I am quickly getting to grips with how it all pieces together but I ran into a problem with a rather basic piece of functionality that pretty much rendered the plugin useless until I figured out the issue.

The section I was working on was a form submission (within the wordpress administation) which saved the form values into the database and then redirected the user upon success to another page (using wp_redirect) but this resulted in a blank content pane.

This seems very strange to me as it showed some of the page contents i.e. the header and left navigation but the content pane was completely blank.
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I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.  I hope that it proves to be a productive and successful year for you all.

I hope to get myself more motivated in 2010 and make 2010 a good year and work for me.  In this aim I hope to post a good few new blog entries on here over the next year and I’ve got a few in the pipeline already including a wordpress plugin I’m developing and moving Manage My Alerts over to Symfony 1.3/1.4 and I hope the entries I post are of use to you.

Once again I would like to wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.

References

Manage My Alerts – An online reminder service

Having  just set up WordPress on here this morning one additional thing I wanted to do which was to put a redirect in place to redirect my sub domain on wordpress.org (which is http://chrisshennan.wordpress.com) to point to my own domain name.

My main reason for doing this was that when I comment on some of my friends blogs (mainly those on blogspot) I have posted the comment using my WordPress profile which only allows me to enter my wordpress username which then links to username.wordpress.com.  As a result I would have to be adding my new blogs entries to 2 blogs which would be a waste of time and bad in terms or SEO (duplicated content resulting in a lower search engine listings).

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I have decided to give blogging another try and as I know that I won’t be able to refrain from talking shop I have made the consious decision not to even try and stop myself from talking shop but I hope to bring in some non-shop talk as well.

So with this attempt I have just created this blog, installed my top 5 essential wordpress plugins and have now just said “hello world” once again! but so far the world has not said hello back :(

I hope you will find something interesting in my blog (once I actually write something) and of course all comments as welcome.