Lately this blog has been suffering from MySQL out of memory error messages which got worse as the days went by. Sometimes Is could not post stories, or my sidebar would not load. Other times I could not load the admin area, or my site went down entirely. After doing a bit of tracing and research I was shocked to discover that my wp_options table had almost 2,000 records in it. As I skimmed through the records I saw that majority of it had rss_ to it, which led me to research on Wordpress’ RSS caching mechanism.

So, I did some more digging until I came across lildude’s explanation of Wordpress’ autoload functionality, which defaults to yes, causing it to bloat the $GLOBALS variable with all the crap our lovely plugins dump into the wp_options table. Finally I came across jayrocas’ post on the Wordpress support forums on how his blog database had a bunch of entries whose option_name looked something like “rss_f07b6018d7bc77b2520b5ec4296f3e66_ts”. After reading the community’s response, I decided to delete all 1,325 rows that started with “rss_”. The query I used was:

DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE “rss_%”

Like magic, my blog loaded without any more hiccups. Reloading the home page immediately after cleaning up the database results in 8 new “rss_” entries. I can only think of two RSS feeds that my homepage pulls from (Flickr and Last.FM) so I’m not sure where the other 6 is coming from. Looking at the database, it appears that there is a duplicate entry for Flickr and Last.FM, and there is 3 entries with the same option_name hash “rss_89613d9a050aad8af096de3c8dfa83bd_ts” and option_value of “1224690561″. I don’t know what’s causing the duplication, or what the bogus triplicate entry is. I have no intention of doing so. Right now, I’m content with a running blog. I’ll just do a database clean up every now whenever necessary.

I am still trying to see if the CommentLuv plugin had anything to do with bloating my wp_options table. There is a huge chance that it does, but I love this plugin so I will just try to upgrade it when I’m done with this post.

Finally, I also installed the Clean Options plugin, which searches for and removes orphaned entries in the wp_options table. Cool. But is there no select all / remove all option? I can’t imagine having to place a check on all 1.7k rss_ entries when it takes me less than a minute to login to PhpMyAdmin and execute that query I listed above. Will this plugin be of any use? I’ll just keep it installed - just in case.

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One of the most interesting things that happened during my stay in Jacksonville, Florida was when I gave alms to a panhandler / beggar. What made this experience unique was the fact that I am a visitor from a third world country, the Philippines, and there I was giving alms to somebody from the first world. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, but we are so used to having people from first world countries like the U.S.A, United Kingdom, France and Sweden visit a third world country like the Philippines to perform various forms of charity work that doing so felt unnatural. It felt surreal.

Even in my home country I always try to do my own share of kindness. Some times, this meant giving some street child some spare change. Other times, this meant getting involved in a health mission. Which is why I was shocked when my American friend chided me for what I did. I shouldn’t be giving money to these people. By doing so, I was supporting what they were doing. In a way, I was supporting laziness. There are beggars and panhandlers because there are generous people who give them money.

I was astounded. I did not think twice when I offered to give the panhandler all my big coins, which probably amounted to half a day’s wage for someone in my home country. But there was my friend, who probably enjoys a salary at least 10 times mine, and he was literally telling me to stop throwing my money away.

He was not always like this. When he was still a student, he would generously give alms to every random beggar. That went on until it came to a point when he stopped and realized that he was giving away his parents’ money. Money he did not work for. Money that did not really belong to him. Money that his parents probably wanted him to have and enjoy. Things changed. Now, he would think twice before giving money. If it were a healthy looking guy who was just dressed a little too dirty, he’d do a double take. If it were a mother with a kid, then he would probably consider giving. It all made sense to him and curiously, I found myself unable to disagree.

Money is power. For some people, it also means happiness. However, people are known to live happily without it. According to the dictionary, “the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support” is the definition of poverty. This makes the concept of poverty very interesting. When can a man really say that he is destitute? Is a destitute man really destitute if he has the capacity to survive without it? After all, there was a time when man lived in caves and survived by consuming its surrounding resources.

I have had many chances but ever since I came back to the Philippines, I have yet to give alms to the poor. Yet, I have had no problems giving a 20% tip to the local restaurants or to my hair dresser. I could have given all that money to the street kid who could not even afford a pair of slippers. Maybe I am becoming a cynic. Or maybe I only like giving if I could see where the money went.

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I just registered for Blog Action Day 2008. Last year the topic was on the environment. This year we’re doing poverty. If blogging for a cause is something that interests you, just click on the button at the top of this post to participate!

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I am heading back to Manila, finally.

Got my blog to work correctly, finally. Had to disable all my plugins manually. Found an article which helped me do it through the database.

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We all know people like to comment on blogs for SEO purposes. Whenever I read an article that has a comment box in it, I almost automatically think of writing a comment to show some love and get a nice little link back to my website. Of course by default these are NOFOLLOW links, but they are links just the same and help advertise your website. Whenever I do that, I would always try to write something witty. I usually find myself checking out a person’s blog if I find his comment witty or interesting, as opposed to the 298,349,834 other variations of the “nice post, thanks!” crap, which serve no purpose than to pollute the internet with more spammage.

Take for example the five most recent comments on my blog. I know Gnob is Bong and is commenting just to get some link back love. At least he took 10 seconds to type something interesting and contributory, as opposed to the last 2 comments which are basically no brainers you can cut and paste into every damn blog post you can find.

That is why I usually mark these comments as spam. Good riddance!

/end rant

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It’s official. Expression Engine is the easiest CMS ever. For me, at least. I have just implemented Expression Engine to be the backend that will drive the CODESIGN Studios website in under a day. The power and simplicity of EE trumps all other CMS that I have dealt with in the past, and which includes the following:

• Drupal
• Wordpress
• Joomla
• Mambo
• DotNetNuke
• Microsoft Sharepoint

(more…)

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Wordpress has released a sneak peek into the new and and upcoming improvements in Wordpress 2.5. Most notable among these is the visual refresh in the administrative dashboard which, I must admit, looks very very slick. Gone are the monotonous blues and rectangular buttons, replaced by a bolder color palette consisting of orange, gray, blue and rounded buttons.

It is also said that the new dashboard is customizable. The article does not explain this feature in-depth, and the screenshots do not show any hints of customizability, but I assume this lets administrators choose which modules to load and where to load them.

Wordpress promises this to be more than simply a “fresh coat of paint”, and introduces a whole bunch of new features, which simply eliminates the need to install additional plugins that perform the following:

• Multi-file upload (finally!)
• Built-in galleries (Flickr support would be nice as well)
• One-click plugin upgrades
• Tag management
• Built-in Gravatars
• Full text feeds
• Faster load times

That may be a bit too much for some users, who may prefer to keep the core Wordpress installation at its barest minimum (e.g. lightweight), but the new features sure look handy.

Considering that this is a minor release (Wordpress is currently at version 2.3.3), the update seems a bit heavy. This makes me wonder how smooth the transition will be. Many sites have their blogs setup to the point where everything “just works”. If upgrading to 2.5 means breaking most existing themes and plug-ins, then I doubt the majority will be rushing in on the upgrade.

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So I bought a Windows Rudolph account from Top Hosting Center which I previously blogged about.

This is the real deal folks.

For my domain, I purchased dennisonuy.com. After all, we are talking about the lifetime domain here A bit redundant since I already have dennisonuy.ph but hey there’s no telling how long I’m going to be able to keep that domain.

Kudos to the folks over at THC for their work and dedication on this awesome product!

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I just signed up for “The Best Web Hosting Offer Ever”, and to me it just sounds too good to be true:

With 95 USD you get professional web hosting for life. No other costs, you’ll never have to pay for upgrades, there are no catches (well maybe just one: we will not give away more than 1000 Rudolfs).

• 250 GB disk space – that’s huge!
• 3000 GB speed - that’s insanely fast! (guys, if 3000 GB refers to the monthly bandwidth allocation, then it has absolutely NOTHING to do with speed — Dennison)
• 1 Free domain registration !
• Host as many domains as you like,
• create as many subdomains!
• Unlimited MySQL and much more!

(more…)

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Those who frequent this site may have noticed that I did a little cleanup in the categories list. I had some difficulty searching for a tool to merge categories. Entering “Wordpress merge category” did not give me the results I was looking for, and for a while I contemplated writing my own. Halfway through studying how to do this I decided to give it one more shot and luckily landed on this website, containing the Extended Categories Manager plugin for WordPress. I was saved.

Installing went without a snitch. Dropped the file into the plugins folder and I was ready to go. I only needed the Merge Categories feature, so I did not fiddle with the “Quick Edit Category” area. I assume this allows you to rename and change the alias of a category.

If you’re looking a tool to merge categories in WordPress, this tool is all you’ll ever need.

Click here to go to the plugin homepage.

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