Ian Dunn

Including External View Files in WordPress Widgets

Ian — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:22:23 +0000

I ran into a problem today while cleaning up and modifying some widgets. I moved all of the markup inside widget() to an external view file, and then included it via require_once(), which worked fine. I then tried to do the same thing inside form(), but didn’t get any output. It turns out that you can’t use include_once() or require_once() inside form(), you have to use include() or require() instead.

Pushing Back Against Unreasonable Employer Demands

Ian — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:34:49 +0000

I just read a good article on work/life balance from Kendall Guillemette. It’s encouraging to hear others in the industry pushing back against the sense of entitlement many employers have regarding our time (which is to say, our lives). I think the 40-hour work week was one of the most important advances of the labor movement, but it seems like so many people give it up (or are pressured into giving it up) without really considering the cost or fighting back.

This is one of the main reasons I love working with a small company where I have a lot of autonomy and input. I could probably make significantly more money at other places, but it’d mean working 50+ hour weeks (among other things), and it’s just not worth it.

Comparing WordPress, Drupal and Joomla in 2011

Ian — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:41:54 +0000

Ok, so it’s already 2012, but I just came across an article comparing the three from last year and it was a good read. Like a lot of articles, though, the real value is in the comments more than the article itself. Going into it I had the impression that Joomla was a stagnant mess, but it sounds like they’ve really cleaned things up since the last time I used it. WordPress is still my default choice for most projects, but I’d give my left arm for it to have an object-oriented, MVC architecture like Joomla now does.

FastCGI errors after PHP upgrade

Ian — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:00:16 +0000

I ran into a small problem upgrading PHP from 5.3.5 to 5.3.10 on a MediaTemple CentOS VPS today. The upgrade completed without any errors, but when I reloaded the site I got a “500 Internal Server Error” message. It was the stock installation, so I’m not sure which module it was using or what repository it came from, but I was upgrading it from the Atomic repository, which loads the FastCGI module by default. The odd thing is that it worked fine on the dev VPS, but not on production.

It turned out to be an easy fix once I figured out the problem, though; I just had to change the ownership of /var/www/cgi-bin and it’s contents so that the apache user could execute cgi_wrapper.

Here’s what was turning up in the error logs:

Apache vhost error_log

[warn] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] (104)Connection reset by peer: mod_fcgid: error reading data from FastCGI server
[error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Premature end of script headers: index.php

/var/log/httpd/error_log

suexec policy violation: see suexec log for more details

/var/log/httpd/suexec_log

uid: (10001/username) gid: (505/505) cmd: cgi_wrapper

/var/log/httpd/suexec.log

target uid/gid (10001/505) mismatch with directory (0/0) or program (0/0)
uid: (10001/username) gid: (505/505) cmd: cgi_wrapper

WordPress Backup Options

Ian — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:22:06 +0000

Nathan Ingram put together a thorough post on backing up WordPress and a chart comparing various plugins and services.

Faster jQuery Selector Calls with Chaining

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:22:20 +0000

Rob Tarr ran some benchmarks to prove the claim that chaining jQuery selector methods is faster than placing them all in a single method call.

Placing Snippets in a Functionality Plugin Instead of Theme

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:17:18 +0000

Dave Clements has a great suggestion for adding snippets to a WordPress site in a way that will preserve them between theme changes: create a simple functionality plugin.

Why “Click Here” is A Bad Practice

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:13:55 +0000

Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.

Scaling WordPress Installations

Ian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:36:52 +0000

TJ Stein gave a really good presentation at WordCamp Chicago 2011 about scaling and performance issues with WordPress installations. He focuses a lot on using ngnix instead of Apache, but also covers PHP object caching, Varnish, CDNs, benchmarking, etc. It’s a good overview of current practices, but there’s also a lot of specific tips throughout.

Rejecting Small Font Sizes

Ian — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 06:53:28 +0000

D Bnonn Tennant makes a good case for using larger font sizes, although I would probably vote for 14 pixels instead of 16. And of course it should be set in em’s instead of pixels.