Recently, my provider had updated the server my webspace is hosted on to PHP 5 and while at first I didn’t notice anything wrong, there actually was a creeping background problem: all WordPress installations refused to send out any emails and in some cases even timeout error messages appeared from the PHPMailer module.
After some unsuccessful digging, I found a post on the bugtracker of PHPMailer regarding an incompatibility with PHP 5.2 – apparently there is a problem with this particular PHP version related to the Regex function. So if you suddenly have those error messages, like a timeout in class-phpmailer.php on line 879 in the case of WordPress, check what PHP version your webserver is running. In my case, the server defaults to 5.2, but I was able to switch it with the line AddHandler php55-cgi .php in the .htaccess file to 5.5 and then everything worked again.
If your webhost supports this method of switching to different PHP versions, this will fix the problem – if not, you have to ask your webspace hoster to switch versions or install a higher version yourself. Reportedly anything above 5.3 works, but I only tested it with 5.5 and it works fine with WordPress 3.9.2 and the release candidate of 4.0.
Just FYI: if you tried to access my websites last night sometime beginning at 1:15am UTC, you might have gotten nothing in return. I found an email in my inbox this morning from my webspace provider that the server my sites are hosted on developed a sudden hardware fault and had to be swapped out, causing a downtime of a couple of hours. But everything is fixed now, running smoothly and no data was lost! Normal service (i.e. more images over at the Photography Blog) will resume later this afternoon :-).
So, big props to the folks at All-Inkl.com, where I’ve been a customer for ten years now – I’ve never had a problem and the few times I really had to ask the customer support about something, they were always enormeously helpful. And it’s not even terribly expensive – I consider about €86 per year for 100 gigabyte space, five domains and a lot more extras a very generous price!
I’m not complaining about the weather, but don’t expect anything major coming from me in the next days. I know, 33°C is not really that hot compared to what other countries have to endure, but it’s still enough for us, thank you very much. At least it’s not humid, but we North European softies are just not used to these temperatures because they don’t happen all that often around here. So we do actually moan and complain about the weather, but only a little bit. Don’t be fooled by the rather silly media labeling it as another dangerous heatwave – if people are not clever enough to keep their houses and apartments cool, you can’t really help them. We also don’t have air conditioning and still managed to keep the inside temperature at about 25°C.
The heat still melts your brain, though – this post is the most you can get out of me in the next few days! But I will continue posting the usual photos over on the Photography Blog (which I finally gave a temporary name in the blog header!) and I also updated the English language review index over on DVDLog, so I haven’t been as lazy as it seems :-).
I think it’s time to put up these signs. Football, or Soccer as it’s known in America, is like Carnival: it’s a matter of taste and believe it or not, there are some people that don’t like it and other people who cannot understand it that some people don’t like it. That is why signs like these are unfortunately necessary. By all means have fun watching the games and cheering for your team, but do not expect me to partake in any of this. If you have use for these signs, you can download them as printable PDFs in both English and German versions. Thank you for reading :-).
What, another Easter, I thought we had that just last year? Oh well, another year has come and gone and 2014 at least brings a little warmer weather than last year, when we even had a little snow on a very early Good Friday. I hope everyone’s having a nice Easter holiday weekend – I’m going to take it very easy this year and although I have several things lined up on my websites, there won’t be tons of new material. So, with this post I’d like to wish everyone a nice Easter holiday!
Over on DVDLog, I’m just going to repost last year’s review of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? later, which I had translated to English for the first time back then. It’s more of a joke than a real easter movie and I really should have prepared another review, but I’m not very good at writing long articles at the moment, so I’m just using the archives a little bit. More Sherlock Holmes will be coming soon and some other random reviews. But contrary to what it may look I’m certainly not giving up the website, just slowing down a little bit. I still have so much great stuff to write about and older articles to translate.
The Photography Blog is where I’m most active at the moment, posting at least four images a day and having a lot of fun interacting via Google+ with other photographers all over the world. I’m posting mainly flowers at the moment, but in addition to the City Views series I have also started a River Views collection with some of my favourite photos from our local waterfront. What I still haven’t done is redesign the blog and the galleries, although I have at least now translated the complete frontend into English. A new design will be coming, I just haven’t found the perfect new look yet, let alone a proper name for the website!
And here on the old main Blog or website or whatever you may call it, I’m still posting a mix of computer geekyness, webdesign and, of course, science and astronomy, of which there will be somewhat more in the next few days because there’s a certain event next weekend I want to promote as much as possible. I will start with that tomorrow and post a couple of articles over the course of the next week. (Also, there’s a SpaceX rocket launch attempt this evening at 21:25 CEST which you can watch live on NASA TV :-). I’m also going to continue the Vintage Computing series at some point, but the next postings still need a lot of preparation and research, so it might be a while until that’s ready.
So, this was this year’s Easter update – not much, but at least a little something. Have a nice Easter, everybody! As usual, you can follow my web exploits on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, although I’d recommend Google+ if you want to interact with me as I’m only really active there.
Just a quick update what’s going on here on the blog except all the computer nostalgia: It’s been a while since I had decided to switch over all my websites completely into English, but the blog templates are still mostly German. Yesterday I finally started changing this here on the blog – fortunately I designed the template in such a flexible way that I only have to change some text descriptions in the code. What I’m not going to do, of course, is to translate all the older blog posts, but everything from now on will be in English, save for some very seldom exceptions.
While I was poking around in the template, I also did something I wanted to do a long time ago: I changed the links in the top menu bar from the old HTML parts of the website to the blog categories. That means that the buttons Books, Music, Computer, Games and Sim now point to the respective blog categories instead of the very old and only half-finished HTML-only parts of the site. DVDLog and Foto will continue to redirect to the two external sites, though. This is only a temporary measure – the grand plan is still to make dedicated landing pages for these sections which will display the latest blog postings from the category, but also will have their own menus and subpages. I haven’t deleted the old pages from the server, they’re still there – only they’re not linked from the main menu anymore.
The first section which I will probably work on is the Computer area. The current Vintage Computing postings will be a basis for the Commodore section, but the goal is to create a full computer history almost up to the present day. The other “microsites” will be created when I have time or just when I feel like it – the bottom line is still that this whole website has been under construction since I first started it in 1998 and it probably always will be. It’s been fun so far and I see no reason to stop tinkering with the website :-).
For my last blog posting of 2013 I decided on something unusual. Because it was really the year of Google+ for me, I shared out a few of my circles over there in the last few days. This was not an easy decision, because although Google+ is all about circles, I have to admit that I’m not a big circle sharer. This is mainly because my own collection of circles is rather chaotic, but I chose five of my most important circles to share at the end of this year to highlight and thank all the amazing people I’ve met there. I actually shared the circles yesterday directly on Google+ and this is just a blog article collecting those posts together, but this will be the start of a regular feature. But before we come to the circles…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Photography Essentials – This one is my “small” Photography circle of people I mainly found in the beginning about one year ago. These are people whose posts I don’t want to miss even when I don’t have time to look at all the other circles. Don’t be angry if you’re not in there – there are two more much bigger photo circles coming up after this!
Photography One – This is the first part of my “big” hand-picked Photographer circles. Everybody from the Essentials circle is also in here, plus everyone I noticed in other circles, who plussed or commented on my posts or who I learned to know through other people. If you’re not in there, either I haven’t noticed you yet or you don’t fulfil my one requirement: you have to post your own work. There are only original photography content creators in here
Photography Two – The second part of my “big” Photographer circle. I had to split it to be able to share it because of the 500 user limit. This second circle is the one I constantly add new people to and maybe I’ll post an updated version once in a while!
Science, Space & Astronomy – One of the other things I try to get involved in, or at least promote, is everything about these three fields and for this reason I have a hand-picked circle with everything about science, spaceflight and exploration and astronomy around. It’s a relatively low-noise group, but everyone from space journalists and scientists from the CosmoQuest / Universe Today crowd, many astronauts and a lot more people are in there. If you want even more, have a look at Fraser Cain’s Super Science Circle, on which my circle is, of course, partly based on.
Astrophotographers – There is some overlap with the Science circle, but I chose use a separate circle for astrophotography to see all the beautiful images in one place. Credit where credit is due, though: this circle is also based, but not completely similar, to one with the same name originally shared by Fraser Cain.
This is just the beginning, let’s see what 2014 will bring…! :-)
I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other holiday greetings you prefer! Myself, I like Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect.
At this time I usually write a longer retrospective article about what’s going on here on the websites, but I think I will skip it this year and just say that the last twelve months may not have been very productive from my angle, but it was still a blast. I’ve written lots of blog posts about a multitude of things here, posted several daily photos over on the Photography Blog and the only thing I didn’t really manage is write more movie and dvd reviews over on DVDLog, but since I’ve been busy everywhere else including Google+, I think that can be excused. Connecting to other people all over the world via social networks has been a lot of fun this year – especially the photographer and science communities on Google+ are amazing to say the least. Oh yes, and I’ve begun to switch my websites completely over from German to English, a process which has still not completely finished.
Instead of taking a complete break between the holidays, I’m only going to put DVDLog into a winter hiatus until February and keep on posting a few photos and collected galleries on the Photo Blog. I will also be sharing some of my Google+ Circles over the holidays which I will afterwards collect here in a blog posting sometime at the end of the week. In a more leisurely and relaxed time, there will also be new and updated version of my hangouts and podcasts recommendations with some special thanks to all the wonderful people who have been tirelessy creating amazing content all year.
So, have a nice and relaxing winter holiday, everyone – I’m going to be semi-around in the next few days and will be taking everything very easy.
It’s been over eight months since the last major release, but now WordPress 3.6 has been released, which meant an update marathon for me – and I haven’t even checked out the new features like the media player! After each major upgrade, I have to redo a couple of small alterations in the code to make working with the built-in editor more comfortable. I had last described the changes in December in a German-language article, but this time I’m translating the updated tips into English.
HTML-Editor: The HTML source editor has been using Consolas as a fixed-width font since version 3.2, but the line height is still a bit to generous especially on smaller screens. The corresponding CSS definition can be found in the file wp-includes/css/editor.css, in which it is possible to change line-height: 150%; in the definition wp-editor-area (formerly textarea.wp-editor-area) to 120% or another desired value.
Visual Editor: The display font of the visual editor is still Times New Roman, but it can be changed in the CSS file wp-includes\js\tinymce\themes\advanced\skins\wp_theme\content.css by changing the font definition in the main .body tag from font: 13px/19px Georgia […] to another font like Verdana.
Get Shortlink: The shortlink button next to the permalink line sometimes pops into the next line on smaller 1024x displays, but the button description can be changed into something less big. Search for the string “Get Shortlink” in the file /wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and just change it into something else. The button can, of course, also be completely removed by deactivating the Jetpack module WP.ME-Shortlinks, but this is of no use if the feature is needed and the button is still too big.
And, of course, it needs to be said that I do not provide any guarantee for these “hacks” – you have to know what you’re doing if you are tinkering around in the innards of the WordPress system files. But if you’re careful and know your way around, these changes will not harm you WordPress installation at all – they are only a cosmetic makeover and no change in the program code is made.
Holy cow, that was a bit too much summer yesterday! I can take a dry heat of 30°C, but the nearly 35°C were really exhausting – and that was not even the highest temperature here in NRW! Yes, I know that in other parts of the world it’s even hotter, but we northern Europeans are comparative softies when it comes to high temperatures. 30°C is really hot, everything more is extremely uncomfortable and sometimes even dangerous, because air conditioning is very uncommon around here and we are just not used to these high temperatures. But with only a bit of effort you can keep your flat reasonably cool as you can see, so I mostly kept inside yesterday. Today it’s about 8-9 degrees cooler than yesterday outside, so we can live again instead of just suffer along.
So, I survived the hottest day of 2013 (yet?), but all I got was a sweaty t-shirt! Maybe I’m babbling here, but yesterdays heat didn’t melt my brain completely thanks to the cooler indoor temperatures. I even got a little bit productive in the writing department, but just in case I put DVDLog on a summer hiatus yesterday and about the only thing I’m capable of at the moment are the daily postings over on the Photography Blog. And of course, on the hottest day of the year, a new version of WordPress comes out and I have to upgrade all the websites… but only after I’ve recovered a bit. This posting is basically just there to say I’m still alive and while not kicking bottom, at least I’m somewhat present. I have some fresh plans and ideas and as soon as I get my groove back, I’ll start working on the websites again.
