Blog

New Theme is Up!

After a week of wrangling, the new website theme is here. I’ve deleted all of the caches on my side, but browser caching may take a little longer to update, so you may see some wonkiness for a bit. I’m still squashing the last few bugs as I find them, so if you see something weird, let me know and I’ll look into it.

The change wasn’t too drastic, but I’m using a new base theme that’s a little more modern than the one I had before, and hopefully will be a little easier to maintain going forward.

Also, today is the last day to vote in the inaugural Swoon Awards! Both Chaos Reigning and The Queen’s Triumph are eligible for votes in the SFR category, and you can vote for up to five of your faves in each category, which makes SFR a little easier because it includes so many excellent books. :)

Server Updates

I’ve moved the blog to a new server! I think everything changed over successfully, but let me know if you run into any issues with commenting, viewing posts, etc.

The new server uses SSL, so you’ll see https:// at the start of the address (and a lock in the address bar). You may also have to re-enter your name/etc in the comment form because the cookies likely got reset.

And don’t forget to enter the Polaris Rising ARC giveaway! My TBR pile is getting bigger and bigger as I read all of your comments. :)

WP-Cron, BackWPUp, and Apache Virtual Hosts

We were forced to switch hosts recently, and while setting up the new server, I ran into a really frustrating issue with wp-cron that had a stupidly simple fix.

Some background: I setup several virtual hosts with Apache that redirected based on the domain name. This is a fairly common setup for running multiple domains from a single server. To test, I modified my local hosts file to redirect the domains to the new server. The actual DNS record was still pointing to the old server until I had everything ready. This becomes important.

Everything seemed to be working correctly but when I’d run a BackWPUp job, nothing would happen. It would say the job was started, but it wouldn’t show me the job running page. It wouldn’t do anything.

Some searching seemed to indicate that this was related to wp-cron. And indeed, wp-cron was not running. Scheduled posts wouldn’t get posted. But none of my searches turned up anything. Wp-cron just wouldn’t run and there was no reason why.

Some digging showed that wp-cron wasn’t even in the access log. In the default setup, wp-cron gets called when someone visits your site. But it gets called via a callback to domain name/wp-cron. This means the server sends the request to the old server if you haven’t updated your DNS.

The stupidly simple fix? Add the virtual host domains to the /etc/hosts (or wherever, depending on your server) with the IP set to the local IP.* Boom. Everything works. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out.

*Alternatively, you can just update the DNS to point to the new server when you’ve hit this point.

Not Exactly Five Nines

Unless, of course, you meant five nines of downtime. (For those of you who don’t know what this means, check Wikipedia here).

It appears our hosting server has had some issues lately, causing an abnormal number of reboots, and Dustin’s auto startup script for our stuff isn’t working anymore. Combine this with the fact that we don’t know the site is down unless we visit it ourselves (which you can tell from my posting history happens rarely at best), and you get random long outages.

We’re working on it and hopefully the site will stay up for more than five minutes in the future. Maybe.

CSS

I’m still trying to get all of the little problems worked out with the default css but it looks like, other than that, everything is working. Now I just have to actually take the time to update more than once every six months. We’ll see…