niczsoft

I have spent today over two hours to find out why my wpmu login (and dashboard) is so slow. For all of You it was wrongly set “Admin Notice Feed” in “Site Admin”/”Options”. bellow a patch that will give extended note about wrong url.

733c733,735
< $rss = @fetch_rss( $url );
—
> $rss_time = time();
> $rss = fetch_rss( $url );
> $rss_time = time() – $rss_time;
752c754,758
< echo “<div id=’update-nag’>Your feed at ” . wp_specialchars( $url ) . ” is empty.</div>”;
—
> if ($rss_time < 30) {
> echo “<div id=’update-nag’>Your feed at ” . wp_specialchars( $url ) . ” is empty.</div>”;
> } else {
> echo “<div id=’update-nag’>Your feed url ” . wp_specialchars( $url ) . ” seems to be broken. Go to \”Site Admin\”/\”Options\” and corect \”Admin Notice Feed\”</div>”;
> }

I have also filled a request on wpmu forums to add it to include this patch in wpmu.

After writing previous post about mod_rewrite I have discovered that google webmaster tools stoped veryfing my domain www.niczsoft.com. After investigation I sadly have discovered that Ask Apache Search Engine Verify plugin neither Add Meta Tags can display meta tags on my page. short reading allowed me to find the right place to correct this behavior:

1. go to your’s installation directory of search-engine-verify,
2. edit file search-engine-verify.php at line 191 change

if(is_home() && !is_paged()){

with:

if((is_home() && !is_paged()) || is_page()){

With this two steps all pages will contain veryfication tags, so you can redirect as many pages as you wan’t.

There are at least two methods of an Internet address/domain to point to another location:

• writing small frame and hosting it under originally address/domain – this way our original source will be hidden from visitors eyes.

• writing small mod_rewrite rule to forward originally address/domain to another one, this is the case if we like both domain names, but think that the second one is more important.

Rules of modrewrite can be writen almost everywhere in apache configuration, but most convinient places are:

• directory vhosts.d in apache configuration directory under etc, this location varies between Linux distributions but most likely it is something like /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/
• file .htaccess that can be found at yours project directory served over apache, this can be something like /srv/www/www.niczsoft.com/.

In all locations You have to write the same content

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www\.niczsoft\.com [NC]
RewriteRule . http://niczsoft.com/about/ [NC]
</IfModule>

With this rule I have asked my apache to answer all www.niczsoft.com requests with http://niczsoft.com/about/. Please take care for escaping dots in RewriteCond it is required as dot would be matched as any character. In the given example NC stands for no case, so www.NiczSoft.com and WwW.NICZSoft.CoM will match and return the requesting person to http://niczsoft.com/about/.

While using gentoo I get lot of knowleadge of linux internals, i’m very happy of that. But one aspect of this makes me unhappy : X server configuration. While I was using OpenSuSE I get to know SaX2 tool which just configured my X server. Thats how I have thought about getting it run at my gentoo box.

Instruction on how it can be build can be found there: instructions, unfortunatelly folowing them i found few problems so I write my own instruction bellow:

sudo -s 
emerge -1q hwinfo Xinerama
mkdir /root/sax2 && cd /root/sax2
rm -f "./sysp/lib/pci/lib/config.h"
touch svnbuild
make
make install
sax2

And thats all folks, now I was able to configure my video card with no special knowledge of modelines or whatever is needed to write xorg.conf files

As I’m currently in process of installation gentoo 2008.0, I have learned few things:

1. do not believe that Your’s system will work after update
2. try to have backup boot medium like live cd or live usb stick
3. have your home on separate partition or maintain a backup of it

As my OpenSuSE box beaked down on system update I have thought about going back to Gentoo. This was crucial step as I was really interested to have system build to satisfy my needs.
Gentoo is sort of such systems, it allows full customization of OS. For me it was the only choose, other systems take back the control of the system.

Currently I’m working on 3way Gentoo, which will allow users to safely update their system without loosing current working set of applications.

3way means that in basic configuration the system will be working on 3 system directories, one for compilation, one for system and one for backup. This way (one of 3) user will have always working OS. it is easily possible to make it 2 or 5 way process, as only first two steps are necessary, rest of them is only backup of the working tree.

I should have some results on this topic in next week.