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Category Archives: Geek stuff

“Related Posts” section mangled

11-Nov-08
Ever since my ill-advised upgrade to a couple of plugins destroyed my site over the weekend (just as my traffic went through the roof when a few Japanese fan-sites discovered my photos of Lee Byung-hun), my Related Posts section below each article has been misbehaving, at least for articles written since I rebuilt the site. I'll try and figure out how to get it working again over the coming weekend, but in the meanwhile take that section with a serious pinch of salt. Related posts:New Korean-related novels in English For those of you who still have your copy of...Stay tuned for special year-end posts Coming up on New Year’s Eve: the inaugural London Korean...Welcome to LKL 4.2 Welcome to LKL 4.2. ...
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LKL goes fixed width

26-Sep-08

LKL goes fixed width

Today sees another minor change in the LKL templates. Ever since I launched LKL I've been using PCs with screen resolutions of 1280 pixels wide. I'm about to move jobs and my new work PC is a rubbish one, with a screen only 1024 x 768. While testing out my new machine I realised that the latest release of the LKL theme doesn't look so good on retro screens, so I've gone fixed-width. On a 1024 screen the LKL content will now fill the whole screen, while on a 1280 screen the margins at the side will be about the same width as they are now (they're currently set at 8% of the screen width). Let me know if you ...
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Welcome to LKL 4.2

18-Sep-08

Welcome to LKL 4.2

Welcome to LKL 4.2. Regular readers will have noticed the design change I made over the weekend, which I’ve been playing with on my test site for a while. In the past I’ve consciously kept the LKL front page as boring-looking as possible: when I launch the front page at work I don’t want to be greeted with a big colourful picture of a Korean celeb. But for a while I’ve been introducing thumbnail images into the sidebar to draw your attention to particular events, so I’m now ready to introduce a little bit more colour to the main content section. In LKL v4.0 I introduced thumbnail images to accompany the post-summaries on the archive pages. And now I’m introducing them ...
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Another tweak

19-Aug-08

Another tweak

So soon after the release of v4, here's 4.1. My brain has been unable to stop fretting over getting better navigability on this site, including encouraging people to read more than the one article they land on when they google-search for a pic of Super Junior. First came the related post list a few days ago. Now I've done some additional styling to that list to separate it out from the main body of the post. I've also added another section encouraging people to click on the relevant post category, tag or author for other things which might be of interest to them. But because most of the content on this site is written by one particular blogger (ie me), I ...
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Welcome to LKL v4

17-Aug-08

Welcome to LKL v4

It may not look like a big change, but it's been exercising my mind for a few weeks. The underlying change is an upgrade of my blog templates to take advantage of all the latest functionality of WP2.6. LKL's look and feel is based on Scott Wallick's plaintxt templates. Scott faithfully upgrades his templates to keep up with WordPress upgrades, and he's now on v 4.6.1. Until today, LKL was based on Scott's v3.0.2. So my task for the past week or so was to transport all my existing tweaks and check that they still work on the latest version, which by and large they do. While I've been getting into the code, I've been making a few other changes I changed the ...
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WP upgrade - please report any bugs

18-May-08
I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but I think that was my quickest and most trouble-free upgrade ever. I've now moved from 2.2.3 to 2.5.1. Please leave a comment below if you notice anything wrong Related posts:WordPress 2.1.3 upgrade Sorry for the brief hiatus this afternoon as I upgraded...Upgrade to WP2.2.3 completed Please report any bugs by leaving a comment below. Apologies...Welcome to visitors from www.disney.com Reviewing my site statistics today I notice that I’ve had... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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LKL goes multi-lingual

14-Apr-08
For a trial period, I’ve installed a translation service in the LKL sidebar. Click on the little flag to read LKL in the language of your choice. Those of you who are familiar with more than one language can have fun seeing what nonsense is churned out by the little gizmo. At the moment, the translation service is provided by Google, but other services are available. If I find the service takes up too much processing power, I’ll switch it off again. Please leave any comments or observations below. Update. I had to switch to Babel Fish. Google stopped translating after a while, thinking that this was some sort of spam attack. Related posts:Sorry - now only registered users can post a comment ...
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I think we’re just about done

05-Apr-08
So I think I’ve now stabilised things at my new webhost. I can now start thinking about all the improvements I’ve been meaning to try, including: Improving the navigation with drop-down menus to make browsing easier. Maybe people might stay and have a look round once they’ve found their picture of Super Junior. Finding the right combination of calendar / events list plugins to do a half decent job so that I can display a list of upcoming events that will get indexed by google. Sounds so easy, but I still haven’t found the right solution. Ditching my hard-coded sidebars and moving to widgets to make maintenance easier. NOW DONE Getting self-hosted videos to work on my site. I’ve got all this stuff piling ...
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Optimise your website. Lose readers. Gain revenue

05-Apr-08
A lot was going on in LKL during March. I’ve been setting up test blogs on my server; I’ve been testing new plugins; I’ve been exporting my database and reimporting it every which way. I’ve been playing with different versions of WordPress. All this in preparation for the move. I also installed the All-in-one SEO pack. [ad#small-horizontal] Some time towards the end of the month I noticed: that my RSS feed was sick (I couldn’t get an RSS reader on the Korean Artists test blog to read it) and that my readership had halved in the space of two days. I’m a bit hazy about the cause and effect between all these things going on. I don’t know whether a lot of my readers visit because ...
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The LKL move, or, how I moved webhosts, changed my URI, cleaned up my database and
upgraded my WordPress installation in ten not very easy steps

05-Apr-08
… and why I haven’t been posting much content over the past few weeks. It may seem strange to offer a “how-to-move-your-website” article when my own upgrade was less than seamless. Part of my trouble was that I was trying to do several things at once. Move webhost from a shared host to my own Virtual Private Server. Not being a webhost professional, configuring my various hosting tools was a learning experience in itself. Upgrade from WordPress 2.2.3 to 2.3.3. Change my site’s URI to get rid of the "/blog" in the title Each one of these tasks is likely to cause disruption in itself, and I wanted to avoid three separate opportunities for mess-ups. So I opted to get it all over with at ...
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Moving WordPress from a shared host to a VPS

05-Apr-08
Many of the lessons I learned moving to my new VPS could apply to moving between any shared webhosts. I’ve got a separate post on that here. This post is all about the additional lessons relevant to moving up a step on the webhosting ladder. First, an obvious lesson. It’s scary. In my first attempt, I bought some VPS space at what I thought was a first-rate host, found I couldn’t make head nor tail of the software (it was Plesk), found also that the support people weren’t geared up to dealing with novices, so I closed my account. That was Webfusion, part of Pipex. I then bought some space at a VPS host which gave software I’m used to – ...
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LKL has (crash) landed

31-Mar-08
If you can read this post on my website, it's because, magically, I've managed to land LKL at the right airport. I might even have landed on the right runway. But I know in advance that I'll have skidded off the end of the runway, or might have damaged the gantry on the terminal building. Most of the damage can be fixed, but it will take time. So please bear with me as I identify and fix any bugs. Something's bound to go wrong when you move webhosts. Hopefully nothing that can't be put right. I've retained all the LKL stuff at my old webhost, so in the event of a complete disaster I can go back and start again... Please report ...
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LKL is on the move (again)

30-Mar-08
You may have noticed a significant drop-off in content over the past few weeks, and particularly over the Easter weekend. That's because I've finally been turning my mind to moving the site to a new webhost. I know I'm going to encounter all sorts of problems, and I've been doing dummy runs of the move on a test site, but things will inevitably go wrong. One thing that will go wrong, for sure, is that most of my hangul will be lost, and a load of apostrophes will come out looking like this: ’. I've tried all sorts of possible solutions to this, none of which work. While I'm at it, I'm also trying to move from a non-standard WordPress installation (I'm ...
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New Year’s resolutions

02-Jan-08
1 I will free myself from the daily post Having managed to maintain one post per day for the past 15 months or so, even when on holiday, I've now proved to myself I can do it. To be honest, it's never been much of a struggle to find something to write about, and it's always a help when other contributors provide material. But henceforth if I'm too busy or on holiday I won't feel too bad if I miss a few days. 2 I will move webhosts. Again. Bluehost are fantastic webhosts, but if you need to do anything complicated with your site you need to be elsewhere. Top priority for my site in terms of ...
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Site now functioning OK again

29-Dec-07
Visitors earlier today might have come across the error message: WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine] (and more). A bit of googling suggested that I might need to repair my database using cPanel (which I did, though there was nothing much to repair) or repair individual tables which had "Overhead" using phpMyAdmin (which I also did - though only one table had this problem). Following up on another suggestion, I also checked the /tmp directory to see if it was over-full, but it was empty. When the error message persisted, a quick call to my webhost (Bluehost) fixed the problem. Apparently the RAM disk was full, or something like that - their problem, not anything I could control - ...
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Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

25-Sep-07
The server on which this site is located is playing up at the moment. You may be getting error messages like "MySQL has gone away". My webhost assured me they're working on the problem. In the meanwhile please bear with us. Related posts:Flickr photos - normal service will be resumed as soon as possible I don’t know what’s going on with my Flickr page....Site now functioning OK again Visitors earlier today might have come across the error message:...It seems I’m using too much CPU… I just tried to access this site and received the... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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Dokkaebi ate my post

13-Sep-07
I'm not sure what happened to today's post. I definitely wrote it last night, and scheduled it for publication this lunchtime, but somehow it's vanished into the ether. It's nowhere to be found in the database; google desktop hasn't cached it; and altogether it's as if yesterday's labours were in vain. I'll just have to write it again. Meanwhile, here's a dokkaebi. Related posts:Random Post plugin Thanks to Fred Anderson over at Vituperation for an ingenious...Gradual progress on events list I’ve been struggling for a while to find the right...The Anglo-Korean Society post-graduate bursary Not to be confused with the SOAS / AKS post-graduate bursary. That... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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Upgrade to WP2.2.3 completed

09-Sep-07
Please report any bugs by leaving a comment below. Apologies for the temporary disruption. Related posts:WordPress 2.1.3 upgrade Sorry for the brief hiatus this afternoon as I upgraded...LKL has (crash) landed If you can read this post on my website, it’s...WP upgrade - please report any bugs I hope I’m not speaking too soon, but I think... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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Please stress-test my drop-downs

01-Sep-07
LKL v3.1 is here in beta version. Or something like that. I'm celebrating the start of September with a test release of drop-down menus in the header. So where you see: Home | Events Calendar | About this site | ... etc at the top of this page, there will now be drop-down menus for most of those links. There's no drop-down for Home, Events, or Contact right now, and I'm not sure there ever will be. But all the others have one or two levels of hierarchy below them. It's all part of the ongoing programme to clean up the sidebars. I was getting tired of scrolling down a couple of feet simply to find my links to the Chosun. So now my ...
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Welcome to LKL V3

20-Aug-07
I've finally taken the plunge and moved over to a two-sidebar theme - the way Scott Wallick, its designer, intended it to be used. A number of drivers behind the move: A typically male thing of always wanting the latest version of everything - and Scott has based all the coding for this theme on the Sandbox theme (used by the Marmot, among others) I wanted to get rid of some of the clutter in my header, particularly the links to the introductory pages. I wrote those pages over 18 months ago and at the time represented just about everything I knew. Things have moved on since then. And people were clicking on the page links, finding nothing had changed since their last ...
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Here we go again

15-Jul-07
Bear with me while I upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Hopefully this won't take too long... Update 1: OK, So far so good apart from the fact that I need to upgrade the Flickr plugin... Update 2: Done, so I can now make posts. Please report any other bugs. Related posts:Hacker and WordPress 2.1 update I figured out that if I change the blog templates...WordPress 2.1.3 upgrade Sorry for the brief hiatus this afternoon as I upgraded...Flickr now up & running again After a lot of fiddling about, the Flickr page is... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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Sorry - now only registered users can post a comment

22-Jun-07
I know it's a pain in the backside. But as I increase this site's functionality and content I use more computing power at my webhost. And because I'm using the cheapest hosting package I can get, my webhost takes my site offline for a quick cooling-off period if I'm hogging the CPU too much. Looking at my error logs, this is now happening on average twice a day, ever since I expanded my BlogWatch coverage and introduced the NewsWire service on 9 June. Again, looking at my error logs, up to 40% of my CPU time is taken by people posting comments. I use the word "people" very loosely. More strictly, looking at 99.98% ((Here's the maths: I get 2,000 comments ...
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It seems I’m using too much CPU…

15-Jun-07
I just tried to access this site and received the error message from my webhost that I'd been using too much CPU and the site had been suspended. Looking at the error logs, I see that I can probably cut down on CPU usage if I discourage spam commenters a bit more ((would you believe it: since I moved to my new webhost three months ago my stats tell me I've received TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND spam comments - that's 2,000 a day)). So is there an experienced WordPress user out there who can recommend the best way to do that? It's not spam filters I'm looking for - it's something to stop the spammers being able to post at all. I ...
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New ! Korean NewsWire service

09-Jun-07
For a while now I've been really frustrated at the time it takes for Korean websites to load. When browsing the news sites while eating a lunchtime sandwich at my desk I've got better things to do than wait for those infuriating animated adverts for scary gas-powered kimchi-fridges to load before I can read the actual page -- which as often as not doesn't contain any news item that interests me anyway. In fact, I've been compiling some statistics on page load times and other objective measures in respect of the Korean news websites, and one day I'll get around to naming and shaming the worst offenders for bloating the bandwidth with unnecessary rubbish (imponderable mystery # 1: why, on ...
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The Blogroll is back

17-Apr-07
I finally worked out how to resurrect into my sidebar all my links to other sites. Firstly the WordPress 2.0 upgrade changed the coding required; then, when I imported my database into my new webspace somehow I lost all the categories under which the links were filed. A quick five minutes reinstating the categories and bingo. Related posts:Comments on pages I’m gradually getting more familiar with WordPress. If you hit...Site now functioning OK again Visitors earlier today might have come across the error message:...LKL is on the move (again) You may have noticed a significant drop-off in content over... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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