Category Archives: Technical

Where did my website go

I lost my plant-based website a few months ago, but didn’t realize that the hosting provider had deleted my instance until recently. When my integrations started complaining, I did some troubleshooting and discovered the loss. Yes, I should have paid more attention to the fact that a change in billing would have affected my host’s auto pay. But unfortunately the notifications stopped coming…because MX records for my mail host were also being hosted at the hosting provider.

Sadly, I came to discover that everything had been deleted, including my backups due to the length of time that the bill had not been paid (approximately 3 months). I had to start a new cloud instance and reload LAMP/WordPress install from scratch. There are few more tasks to do before my site is full resurrected again; so if something breaks, please be patient while I fix it.

Ah well, it was nice to re-learn everything again!

Instagram Embeds Stopped Working in WP

Well, I wasn’t sure when my site stopped displaying Instagram posts correctly, but I was pretty sure it worked several months ago. It was only when I navigated to one of my sites today that I saw the blocked message.

I thought it was a plugin issue, but it was not the Smashballoon plugin that was the cause.

Instagram embeds are native to WP, so I had to Google up an answer.

Turns out it was a new measure implemented by Instagram and I needed to allow IG embedding on other sites.

WordPress File Permissions: Always Check and Reset

You’d think after over a decade of troubleshooting WordPress permission issues that I’d have learned my lesson by now.

I’ve been diagnosing site performance issues with my garden blog (the Site Health tool was complaining). One of the issues that constantly kept coming up was a REST API error that reported cURL timeout issues. This usually manifested itself in agonizingly slow page load times. I went through the plugin/theme deactivation dance to hone in on the culprit: Fast Secure plugins that had been defunct for several years but still useful for buffering brute force attempts. I finally decided to move on to a different ReCaptcha solution and retire Fast Secure. Oddly enough, my primary site had the identical plugins installed but never encountered the same issues.

Moving on, I noticed that the Media Library thumbnails never displayed and that I had issues uploading/adding new media (cannot create directory). Now ordinarily my main media storage is in an S3 bucket, but I sometimes might need to make local posts unique to the garden theme of the site.

I spent hours and days researching this issue, thinking it had to be some kind of ownership issue. I kept flipping user and group ownership on files and directories, only to break ownership of other WordPress files and directories. I poured over logs looking for some indication of access errors.

Ultimately, I just had to reset all the file and directory permissions in my WordPress wp-content folder to get things working again:

$sudo find /path/to/website/wp-content -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
$sudo find /path/to/website/wp-content -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Then I reset ownership of wp-content to my wp-user:

$sudo chown wp-user:wp-user -R wp-content/

Then finally, to make sure media uploads and thumbnails worked again:

$sudo chown www-data:www-data -R wp-content/uploads/

Of course while I was resetting file/directory permissions, it was worth reading the updated Permissions topic over at WordPress codex. Turns out I could have a functional site even with wp-config.php set to 440/400.

Last issue that drove me a little crazy. View Details on the Plugin page always resulted in an error: refused to connect. I was so sure that my restrictive firewall settings needed to open an IP block to the WordPress plugin repository. But it turned out to be an SSL issue. Because the details page was in an iFrame, an SSL setting needed to be set to permit this. In my case, I change this setting in the appropriate ssl parameter .conf file:

Header always set X-Frame-Options sameorigin

Then restarted Apache for settings to take effect. Now…does this toggling the option make my site less secure? I’m assuming that if the request came directly from localhost that the traffic should be permitted. I just have to ensure my servers are sufficiently secure against being hacked, a lesson I learned earlier this year, and a story for another day.

oEmbeds Stopped Working: adapting to the new Instagram/Facebook API

What a mess. Just found out that WordPress no longer supports Facebook Instagram oEmbeds, which essentially breaks the format of single Instagram posts on my other sites.

Unfortunately using a plug-in such as Smash Balloon Social Photo Feeds is causing me some grief due to a reliance on Facebook’s API. Already Facebook, unknown to me, locked my account for suspicious activity. (I have a 30 day old account, to use on Messenger and one group.) Then when I finally resolved that issue, Smash Balloon still insists on setting up a Facebook business page to allow for unlimited tokens. So much for staying off Facebook.

Finally, once I took care of the token I just had to repost some of the Instagram posts that were affected; Smash Balloon took care of the rest.

On a side note can you believe WordPress is on version 5.x? It’s come a long way since I first started using it over a decade ago. Also PHP just released version 8, but I guess WordPress is not ready for it yet…so for now, my sites are/will be running 7.4.

I still have to troubleshoot site health issues with my garden blog. I thought hosting on Linode would improve my site’s performance. I’m not sure sharing a database on AWS with my main site is causing the problem. More on that later.

Oh and another inconvenience is using the WordPress app on my my phone. I have to turn off Google VPN to access my self-hosted WordPress sites. It’s becoming quite a chore to disable it while trying to write a post.

Content and hosting update

I realize that new content has been relatively non-existent on this blog due to life and technical considerations. Life has been busy, occasionally fulfilling and oft times challenging, so much so that I’ve been neglecting the written word. On the other hand, my virtual life is somewhat active, whether that be in-game or in-Insta.

On the technical side of things, I’ve been deeply dissatisfied with my web host performance, so I’ve been tweaking things under the hood. I’ve moved away from Google Cloud for my web host VM since it just wasn’t priced competitively against AWS. I am sticking to Lightsail and their S3 storage service, and WordPress.com. Plus I’m dabbling in other services. Linode is my current favorite with their budget friendly yet robust Nanode plan. With a datacenter hosted out of Dallas, TX, I get speedy connections to my VM.

Winter indoors means nesting opportunities and more compute time. I hope to plan/execute home improvement projects and catch up on hobbies such as comic book collection, starting seeds and propagating new plants (big maybe this year), and cleaning up my online databases serving as backend to my social media content.

Year 2020 is just around the corner, and this is also a good time to reflect on new year resolutions. What lies ahead is a future full of opportunities and possibilities, but my foremost need is to keep oneself present and mindful to meet them. Learn, change, evolve.

Lose weight, get fit, eat healthy, expand knowledge. Spend more time with furdad and furkids. Get outdoors more often. Maybe smile more. Participate or volunteer outside my social circle. (That last one is scariest of all.)