I had the plea­sure to expe­ri­ence that last night… again!  Last time it was a plu­gin…  this time is not.  After doing hours of search­ing… peo­ple said that some files maybe infected or the blog could be hacked. Well… that might not be the case. For mine, I recently did an upgrade to the lat­est ver­sion of wod­press, then come back days later the admin sec­tion is all blank – no mat­ter which url I typed.  Here are the symptoms:

• The blog’s front-end is still work­ing fine, noth­ing seems out of place or broken
• I got to the login screen, but as soon as I logged in, it was com­pletely blank
• I could not access any of page in the admin such as by typ­ing: /wp-admin/plugins.php – all blank

1. I checked blog’s front-end and was still run­ning fine – checked if any page is bro­ken or funky stuff show­ing up on the pages.  A bro­ken plu­gin might have be the cul­prit or you sim­ply got hacked
2. So far so good, noth­ing seems bro­ken or out of place. Login, page goes blank. I run the plu­gin Login Lock­down, so I FTP in and deleted the folder to see if that’s the cul­prit – nope. Put it back in.
3. Checked the error log and see what threw error(s) recently – did the same thing above. No go.
4. Found some peo­ple said that empty returns on functions.php or wp-config.php  in your theme can cause that – make sure no blank space on top or bottom…
5. Some said check files for weird stuff got append on top of some php files – checked all files inside wp-admin folder – nope
6. Fast for­ward 3 hours later – finally re-uploaded a new copy of the /wp-admin/ – fixed!  Son of a…

I’ve been very silent on Face­book, Twit­ter, and this blog lately. That because I can’t con­stantly access Twit­ter any­more from work, they blocked me… so no more use­ful stuff to tweet and brag about excepted one thing: Pods CMS. Pods CMS is a Word­Press plu­gin that pretty much turn your blog into a CMS. You can build a Wiki, Glos­sary, Recipes, Hotel list­ing etc… the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Although, you will need to know at least some PHP to make this thing tuned to the way you want it to be. I have been play­ing with it in the past 2 weeks, I have to say I am very impress of how this plu­gin works. So I did a test on one of my hob­bies: Kendo. I’ve always wanted to col­lect data on Kendo Dojo, how many prac­ti­tion­ers, and Kendo tour­na­ment results in the U.S. I was able to cre­ate this very com­plex data­base that it can be listed by Fed­er­a­tions, State, Coun­try, Dojo, and down to the indi­vid­ual Kendo-ist data. The awe­some thing is? Each list­ing can be linked to one another. For exam­ple, if you view­ing by Fed­er­a­tions, you can list all the Dojo in that fed­er­a­tion, and with links to each Dojo AND the state. You can add BUILT-IN fil­ters and search on top! The back­end is all done for you, all you have to do is to make things pretty. Ain’t that grant?

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After 2 days, 16 hours of work, I intro­duce my new theme UnDe­prived :)   Feels good… :D

I would even­tu­ally do a writeup for my entire design process of com­ing up with this theme.  That because I think I am hav­ing a case of early alzheimer or some­thing.  I can’t remem­ber what I want to do in the next 5 min­utes, and I have to resort to use a task man­ager (Remem­ber the Milk) to remind me of things lately.  (more…)

I got this idea of this arti­cle after me and Java­Junky talk­ing and given a tuto­r­ial of how Twit­ter works to a cou­ple of our friends at my birth­day party.  When they went home, 3 peo­ple were on Twit­ter.  I guess me and Java­Junky did a good job on the sales pitch. (more…)

Last month I did a fresh install on this server and I had so many prob­lems with 2.8, so 3 days ago I did another fresh install of 2.8.1, but I got my SQL back­ups cor­rupted some­how… any­ways, I last logged that I could not get the http_error to go away and it seems to be a very com­mon prob­lem for users who upgraded to 2.8 and up.  When you are using the default image Flash Uploader, it’ll says http_error in red.  If you use the Browser Uploader, it just goes blank after you hit Upload.  Even though the imag is uploaded, you can­not do any fur­ther edit­ing with it (see screenshots):

I’ve tried mess­ing with the .htacess, mak­ing file sizes smaller.  Mak­ing images smaller than 600px wide seemed to work for some, but not all.  Then I also noticed that Nextgen Gallery also has the same prob­lem as the default image uploader.  In fact, NextGen Gallery warns that max­i­mum mem­ory exceed at 16.xxMB.  So I went to NextGen Gallery’s site and found this in the FAQ.  Then I went into my Cpanel to inves­ti­gate the PHP set­tings, lo and behold the memory_limit is set to 16MB.  I opened up a ticket to ask my host to increase the limit to 24MB, prob­lem solved.  I no longer have any error when upload­ing any images.

One last thing though, after I got the memory_limit changed from 16MB to 24MB.  I started to get 505 Inter­nal Server Error.  Luck­ily, I have a very awe­some host, they fixed the prob­lem within half an hour after I opened a ticket.   Although, my host used .htac­cess to fix the prob­lem.  Then a new prob­lem came out, all the perma­links seem to be no longer work­ing.  They all returned as 505 Inter­nal Sever Error.  I solved it by check­ing the .htacess file and took out what my host put in and just left the Word­Press .htac­cess – prob­lem fixed.

Hope that helps some­one else out there.