Last day when coming back to edit my blog (http://www.exnol.com ) I was literally shocked to find out that the login page took ages to load. Thinking that it was a server issue because I had been here a few hours before, I came to face the reality the hard way. The problem was that the landing page or the front page or the index page of the blog was alright without any problems but every other page including the admin pages took many minutes to load, sometimes even dropping the connection.

So what should we do on such situations? After a brief search on Google and coming out with no practical answers I decided to go my own way. The steps : Since the front page was OK it was not a Database or Server issue. To make this sure I tried [intlink id="filezilla-free-ftp-client-and-server-for-windows" type="post"]FTP using Filezilla[/intlink] and found out that FTP was fine. Since the admin interface was affected I couldn’t try deactivating plugins altogether. so I decided to try a trick. Rename the “plugin” folder.

Note the path to the folder : /wp-content/plugins

Right click on the folder and select Rename. Rename it with some other thing. You would successfully have brought down your WP blog now. Most probably your blog won’t work. (Make sure you try to access your blog at least once after the renaming). But hey its just temporary. Rename the folder back to plugins. Now you will have all of your plugins deactivated.

Now start reactivating plugins one at a time or in groups and watch which plugin is causing the trouble. This was my idea of the last minute trick you can use to deactivate plugins if the admin pages are unavailable. Share your thoughts!

Many Wordpress blogs including this one faced a major problem after upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 a few days back. Although the whole new look of Wordpress is extremely easy and well designed for some the tinyMCE editor (default post editor for Wordpress) was screwed up. This meant that no new post could be made or existing one edited with the current setup.

The most common problem was that the Visual editor tab was missing. When you click on the new post or edit buttons you go straight to the HTML editing mode. And if you click on the Visual tab the whole text as well as editor window is blank.

In my case if I selected the editor windows I can see the HTML highlighted ie the text was still there but was in white color and un-editable. From then on no buttons on the page including HTML mode, Preview, Save Draft, Publish etc worked.

After going through numerous threads on the wordpress forum finally I was able to sort out the problem. Many a peple at the forums had pointed out that the problem would naturally be with some plugin that modified the TinyMCE advanced. I tried deactivating the TinyMCE advanced plugin. But it still didn’t work. After sometime I found that websuccessdiva solved the problem by deactivating RB internal links plugin. The plugin allows you to link the text with already published posts inside the TinyMCE window itself.

Solution : Try deactivating the plugins that directyly affect the tinyMCE interface. for some this was RB internal links, for some this was Kimili Flash Embed. Although there was an opinion to install Wordpress 2.7 fresh instead of upgrading this seemed not so practical.

This post is an Answer to the comment posted by Carol A Ranney on “How to make custom icons”.

A favourite icon commonly known as a favicon is the small image shown near the URL in the address field of the browser. Now a days these icons are also used for bookmarks. You can easily create one for your web site too. Here are the steps involved :

1. Create a favicon.ico file

Use the method mentioned in How to make a custom icon. Create an icon with a size of 128×128 or larger dimension which you can work easily on. Now scale it down to 16×16px. It is better to use 256 colors only. Save his as favicon.ico

2. Upload the icon

If you are the admin then upload the icon to the root directory of your web site. This is normally public_html or where the index.html file lies.

You will be able to see the icon for all the pages from your web site now.

3. Adding a <link> field

If you want to use a different icon for a particular page add

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="ICON" type="image/x-icon" />

in between the <head></head> tags of the page where icon location refers to PATH/favicon.ico the place where you saved the icon.

4. More on favicons

Most of the current browsers also support GIF files as favicons. Use the name favicon.gif if you are using one. You can use animated icons by saving the animation as a GIF file and then use it as your favicon. Firefox even supports png file to be used as favourite icon.

If you have any further doubts please feel free to comment here.

A Contact form is an essential form for any website. But if you are on blogger or a free host you wont be able to create one on yourself even if you know PHP. Although if you are running WP you can get plugin’s specific for that application. I use cForms for my contact forms.

So if you just need a frills free contact form you can place on your website you may try Contactify . It offers free contact forms as well as spam protection (word verification) for the service. You just need to copy paste the JavaScript they provide after you register.

Here is my sample contact form : Contact me

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Does anybody notice the rising CPU usage of your browser when you are at the create post page (Tiny MCE) of your self hosted Wordpress blog? Previously when I was using Firefox the CPU usage rose to 50 percent and FF was running fast like a snail. I thought it was because of problems with FF. Last day when I was using Opera Process Explroer was open. I couldn’t believe that Opera too used very much CPU resources. It was then that I realised the culprit was the Wordpress Create Post page (A intersection B, lol).

I was amazed when a Google search provided me only one relevent result. The problem is actually with the Wordpress “autosave” feature. If autosave is enabled, then the “Save” “Publish” buttons on my post page used to blink. Everything will come to normal once you “Disable AutoSave” on your blog.

To disble AutoSave you need to comment out the function wp_enqueue_script(‘autosave’); from the following file by adding “//” before them. Comment the line in the following files – /wp-admin/post.php  /wp-admin/page.php  /wp-admin/post-new.php  /wp-admin/page-new.php

After commenting the lines should look like – //wp_enqueue_script(‘autosave’);

Upload these files back and you will have solved the problem. Remember that since SutoSave is disabled you must manually save changes while writing a post.

I didn’t notice the CPU usage while using Opera because Opera is better than Firefox at managing memory and CPU. Also the overall perfomance of the Opera was not affected by the presence of the post page. But in FireFox when the page ws open I couldn’t scroll through any of the pages or couldn’t switch tabs by cliking on them.

I found all these information from Richard Timothy’s blog. Thanks Thimothy .

Some times Blogger will show a “server was encountering a problem” message when you try to login and will give you an error code and say that an engineer had been notified. There are some things you can try to login to blogger when such an error occurs.

If Blogger home page won’t load or you can’t login directly.

1. Go directly to Blogger Login Page http://www2.blogger.com/login.g and try logging in.
2. Sign in to Gmail or Google then take a New Browser Window (CTRL+N) or a New Tab (CTRL+T) and goto http://www2.blogger.com/home. This will take you to the Blogger Dashboard directly.
3. Try clearing the cookies and goto the sign in page.

So the next time you face such a problem, don’t miss a post.