Sunday, July 20th, 2008
I decided that today would be a good day to start configuring Joomla.
I logged in and began at the “Site” section of the Global Configuration area. I took a quick look and noticed that there wasn’t all that much to configure. Here is what I did:
- Changed the editor from Tiny MCE 2.0 to no editor. I don’t like giving others access to HTML on my sites.
- Changed the Global Site Meta Description to Fiixer. (Just a fill in word to get rid of Joomla)
- Changed the Global Site Meta Keywords to fiixer.
- Switched the Search Engine Friendly URLs and Use Apache mod_rewrite from no to yes. Search engine friendly URLs using Apache mod_rewrite is pretty simple if your server and system support it. Some people say doing this enhances your website’s indexing and ranking in search engines. Basically, it changes “index.php?a=aboutus&b=andaboutyou” to “index/aboutus/aboutyou.” It’s cleaner and gives your visitors a chance to remember your URLs. It’s up to you if it’s worth it.
Next, I visited the “System” section of the Global Configuration area. In this section, I mostly kept everything set as it came, but did change two areas:
- Changed the New User Registration Type to “Author.” (I think this gives the registered members the ability to submit articles and web links, but they must be approved by an administrator)
- Turned Cache on. (speeds up page loads on heavy traffic sites)
In the “Server” section of the Global Configuration, I left everything alone.
Ok, that was fairly painless.
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Friday, January 18th, 2008
So I broke through to support today. After days and says of no response, I actually got through to an American who knew what to do. If you aren’t familiar with what I am talking about, please read about it.
I first called Sales. I thought that if anyone would answer the phone at a miserable hosting company, Sales would…and they did. Hey, you always have to have enough people to take the money, right? I told the guy that I wanted to cancel my contract for the server because I couldn’t run a company like this. He got quiet and transferred me to the Philippines. The freaking Philippines…AGAIN!!! I am telling you, when you have a real problem, the best person to talk to is one in the Philippines. Yeah, right. I challenge you to find me one person on the planet who likes their customer service coming from the Philippines. Again, they had no idea what I was talking about but actually transferred me to a living, breathing American server technician. The strange thing is that while I was talking to him, I heard all sorts of commotion going on in the background. It was other support techs talking on the telephone. What was this? How did they get through? Do they have the good phone number? I have the regular customer support number as well as the managed server number. I thought I was golden…guess not.
I talked to the tech for a little while, when he put me on hold. While I was on hold, I was downloading some configuration files from the server. I need them for when I transfer the websites over. All of the sudden, the websites started working again. Do you want to know what he did? He restarted Apache. Gee, I think that is what I have been trying to tell this company to do all week. Apparently, when I was optimizing that huge database, the temp directory became very full. The temp directory only holds about 200MBs and the database was over 750MBs. The optimizing filled up the temp directory and locked up the server. Restarting Apache and cleaning out the temp directory is no big deal, but what good is a company if you can’t get in touch with them to get it done?
I have to say, this hosting company has awesome equipment and really great prices. If they only had awesome support, I would be with them forever. That is such a waste.
I called my new hosting company today to have them set up another server over there. Now, let me tell you why I am with this company…they are the IT provider for some pretty serious companies, like Bluetooth, Motorola, Webmail.us, etc… They have managed backup that is real, they have server monitoring, their support is simply fan-freakin-tastic and their equipment is great. Can you tell that I am happy? The new server should be set up by Monday afternoon. This will make five servers in total, but before you think I am crazy, I want to let you know that I will be skinnying them down to just two over time. With this kind of company, I can afford to have more sites on fewer servers. Also, I am having them locate the servers in separate datacenters in different areas of the country, just in case something goes wrong with one datacenter.
So, I guess I know what I am doing next week.
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
My cron jobs have been running as scheduled, but the strange part is I have been getting status emails…with errors in them.
I am using the cron jobs (Scheduled Tasks) in Plesk to run my sitemap generators. Every time the generator runs, it deletes the old generated files and creates new ones. I was wondering why I was getting errors. Sometimes, the files wouldn’t generate at all.
I called tech support at my new wonderful hosting company. Melissa explained to me that I set up the cron jobs under the user account for that domain. When the jobs are run via web interface online, they are running under the apache user. When they are run by cron, they are running under a different username, without the same privileges. The cron run is not able to delete those existing files and write new ones.
The way I got around this in Plesk was to click on “Server” (over in the left column) and then “Scheduled Tasks.” Once in the scheduled tasks manager, I clicked on “Apache” to set up the scheduled tasks under that user.
I am running the sitemap right now through the cron job…wait…it just finished with no errors and the files were updated correctly. I did not receive a status email because I set the email address up while the cron job was running. I am running a different site right now and will let you know how it goes.
By the way, Plesk is very good.
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