Normanski

A Lost Adbrite Check

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 | Net Moolah | 2 Comments

Finally after a month waiting for a clarification from Adbrite, it is now clear that my check for the month of July 2007 was stolen and was actually cashed-in by some culprits. Though it is just a mere $189 I was troubled by the incident since it could mean that future check payments may suffer the same. As of the moment, I requested Adbrite Support to furinish me a scanned copy of the check and give me some details of the transaction. I plan to exert a good effort to seek an explanation and from the financial institution that processed the check.

Clearly there is an unacceptable fraudulent activity going on in our Postal System and Financial Institutions. When I opened a dollar account I was overwhelmed by the numerous requirements of the bank and my impression was they are very strict to avoid fraudulent transactions. But now it was clear that some banks are tolerating activities by criminals in the Post Office.It’s a little check I know but if most of us will just let things like this pass it will continue to happen and those culprits will never be apprehended.

I have read a lot about lost Adsense Checks from Pinoy bloggers and thus I spared my self the headaches by not using the standard mail delivery and currently I’m subscribed to the Western Union Payment. However for the case of Adbrite and other affiliate programs, they only offer payments through snail-mailed checks thus Philippine Web Publishers are still very much vulnerable to these Post Office scumbags.

I’ll post detailed updates  regarding this provided the guys at adbrite are gonna give me the details and scanned copy of the lost check.

MySQL Optimization and WP-Cache Installation Problems

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 | Lessons Learned | 2 Comments

I have just spent half-a-night optimizing settings for a wordpress site that I maintain. The optimization work is much needed since the site popularity is rapidly increasing and I’m trying to avoid future problems that might be caused by unhandled server stress. Though there is still much to tweak with regards to the settings of the server, I initially focused on MySQL Query Cache tweaks and installation of WP-Cache.

MySQL Query Cache
Tweaking MySQL cache is fairly easy to do and the result was a significant performance gain of your database. To do this optimization tweak you have to access your server via shell and edit the file /etc/my.cnf. Use the command pico my.cnf to start editing the file. Insert the following lines:

query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=1M
query_cache_size=10M (the default was 6M)

For the cache size you have to find the right balance that depends on your Server hardware specifications and the scripts that you are running. I initially changed this to 10M from 6M. I’ll try to observe and analyze the performance gain for a few days.

WP-Cache Installation and Problems Resolved
Configuring wp-cache to run properly gave me a lot of headache and new knowledge. WP-Cache is an indespensible Wordpress plugin that’s why I never gave up on installing it.

Problem 1: Installation and Symbolic Link
After carefully following the installation steps, I am having a broken symbolic link problem by executing ln -s wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php wp-content/advanced-cache.php. The error persist even when I tried the automated symbolic link creator from village-idiot.org (which I think is a very good tool for people who doesn’t know to create a symbolic link or simply does not have shell access to where their blog is hosted).

Resolution: I included the full path of the files in the symbolic link command. the resulting command was:
ln -s /home/myaccount/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php /home/myaccount/public_html/wp-content/advanced-cache.php

Problem 2: WP-Cache is not serving cached files
So I finally got to install WP-Cache but I noticed that the counter for cached pages is not changing! I tried to clear the cache several times deactivate/reactivate the plugin but nothing is happening. I browsed the “cache” folder and I have confirmed that cache files are being generated but the files are not being served by WP-Cache.

Resolution: I compared the plugins that I’m running to another wordpress installation wherein I have successfully activated the WP-Cache plugin and they differ by several plugins. Thus I started a trial and error process by deactivating the plugins one by one. After several retries… Voila! I found it! It seems that the version 1.2.8.5 of All-in-one SEO is conflicting with WP-Cache version 2.1.2. Thus I deactivated the plugin and used another plugin SEO_wordpress, I really love the functionality of All-In-One SEO but I guess I’ll have to wait until the next compatible update.

There are other tweaks that I should work on soon and for those looking for some good tips try this link.