Computing

A series of articles and information about computers in general.

How to put wordpress into maintenance mode.

February 17, 2011By mhelmin Wordpress Tags: maintenace, wordpress

Sometimes you might need to put wordpress into maintenance mode – this replaces your site with a basic message saying that the site is temporarily unavailable.

Why might you want to do this?

To correct a mistake in a template (so put it in maintenance while you restore from your ever handy backup).
While doing manual updating (for instance the automatic updating failed or a plugin is not available for automatic updating).

In order to do this simply put a file in the root of your wordpress install and name it .maintenance . The file MUST be preceded by the “.” similar to a .htaccess file.

Normally this file has code in it to indicate how long the site will be under maintenance, and if the timestamp passes then the file is de-activated and the site is available – for instance to make the site be unavailable until now (Feb 17th 22:28 2011) do the following:

<?php $upgrading = 1297981662; ?>

However if you want the site to stay in maintenance mode as long as needed then the timestamp just needs to be kept changing so the following will do the job:

<?php $upgrading = time(); ?>

And that’s it – simple as that you can put wordpress into maintenance mode without a lot of hassle.

Goals for 2011

January 15, 2011By mhelmin Computing, Iphone, Mysql

Well, a couple of weeks into the New Year, and it’s time for the usual Resolutions. So what are mine this year, well some I am keeping to myself, but a few techie ones remain.

In no particular order I intend to do/get the following:

Obtain a Macbook (Air / Pro).
Learn how to program the Iphone / Ipad
Get a tablet pc (Ipad possibly or windows 7 based one we shall see)
New Digital camera to replace the now aging Canon EOS350 – (my current one has suffered from being in -28 and + 40 in it’s working life)
Get this Blog back up and running doing the following:

Reviewing Iphone Apps – on the Iphone 4 and Iphone 3g
Document insights into MySQL from the servers I manage

Get to grips (finally) with OOP and PHP (come-on I know JAVA so I really should have cracked this already but the old C programming gets in the way).
Have a dabble in Cloud Computing – it seems to be here to stay and since 2010 had virtualisation 2011 is Cloud 🙂

That’s it for now – check back to see how I do 🙂

Loss of title bar / close , minimise and maximise buttons in ubuntu

February 8, 2008By mhelmin Computing Tags: feisty fawn, guty gibbon, ubuntu

A few weeks ago I upgraded ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon – I was very impressed, the enhanced graphics which were not available to me in feisty now worked.

However somehow last week I lost my title bar, so no window title, no minimise or maximise button and the close button was gone. In addition the terminal window was now broken loading up a blank page.

After trawling through various forums and trying half a dozen fixes, with no success I finally tried turning off the special effects, and now have them back.

It’s a bit frustrating, I can only assume that one of the regular updates broke the driver that was working for me previously as no settings had been changed. Ah well – anyone with this problem, it’s really not worth the hassle just to have windows that wobble when moved and desktops that slide when changed 🙂

Ubuntu as home desktop…

September 19, 2007By mhelmin Computing Tags: ububtu, xp home

For three months now I have used Ubuntu as the operating system of choice replacing windows XP on my home computer.
For the most part the transition was quite easy and it’s clear why people are begining to talk about it being able to replace windows for some users.
But there is of couse always a but – and this is a major one for me. Linux and Ubuntu in particular allows you to easily install programs that are compatible with your particular flavour – e.g. Adept installer, synaptic installer or command line utilities such as apt-get etc…

However one problem I have repeatedly come across is I install a program to find that it doesn’t work – generally due to hardware issues on my aging computer – such as low 3d memory etc.. In windows -t his is not normally a problem, but generally programs will test and warn you they are incompatible, however in ubuntu and Linux in general these progams let you install them and then fail.

The odd thing in the “old” days of using just command line usually programs would fail to compile and therefore install if any problems were encountered – however this robustness seems to have been lost in the drive to give the impression that the system can run more programs than they can.

However all said and done Ubuntu is generally good – I would imagine that given a few more releases it will really be able to take off – especially if more people use it with Dell’s new offerings giving more feedback to the developers.

So please someone just make it so I can’t install something that won’t work!

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