Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

June 22, 2012

Bug in FB Publication script fixed + Other Blog woes

Filed under: Knowledgebase,Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:56 PM

Fixed a small bug in the Facebook publication script that I had written, basically if the first para was over 1000 characters the post would fail. At first I thought I would just do a substr and limit the character to 900, but that didn’t work for some reason and I got some really weird posts on FB. But it looks like its working fine now and the last post came up on on Facebook. 🙂

There was another issue which I had faced a couple of days ago on the blog and wanted to document. Basically whenever I tried posting any comment or new post on the blog I would get a really weird error message that made absolutely no sense:

Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again.

After spending a couple of hours on the web over a period of few days trying to get things working, I found a post explaining how to turn DEBUGGING ON in WordPress (See below for instructions) and once I enabled that I found out that the DB I was using was over the max size my hosting company allowed so all inserts were failing, removed junk from the DB (Stats etc) and I was good to go.

To enable debugging follow these steps:

  • Open wp-config.php located in the wordpress blog’s root directory
  • Add the following line to the file:
    define('WP_DEBUG', true);
  • Save the file and Exit

Once you finish debugging you should either comment out the above line or delete it from the file, otherwise a lot of debug information will be shown to your visitors and that is something you don’t really want.

Hope this helps others.

– Suramya

October 5, 2011

Facebook does not like my Blog

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 12:21 AM

Looks like the integration between Facebook (FB) and my blog is broken once again. There is a plugin for WordPress that pushes your posts to Facebook but that requires you to setup an App in Facebook. However since I am not a Developer on FB so far I need to authenticate myself by giving FB either my Credit card # (So not happening) or my cell number (not working).

I have tried both my numbers but so far haven’t received any SMS’s from FB yet. Will try some other plugins while I am waiting but am not too hopeful that I will succeed in the integrating the two today. Lets see…

Update: Looks like all of the plugins require a Facebook app to be created in order to connect. 🙁 Although the problem with me not receiving the SMS could be because Facebook is having issues. At present all profile images on Facebook are showing up as broken for me.

– Suramya

September 17, 2011

All of suramya.com now migrated to new layout

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 5:24 AM

As promised, I have updated the entire Suramya.com site except the Photogallery to use the new website layout/theme. This will make life simpler for me when I update (and yes I will be added new content semi-regularly once again) and make the site look a lot better.

For the Photogallery I might use the Gallery software to host the photos, but haven’t decided yet. Since that will take some work on my side to integrate and migrate data, it will be a while before the new Photogallery is live. Till that happens don’t expect any new posts to the Photogallery.

I will also be adding some more website optimizations etc once I get some sleep and am thinking clearly again. That should speed up the site a lot more. Take a look around and let me know if you find any issues.

– Suramya

September 15, 2011

Exporting Blog feed to Facebook

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 3:09 AM

I thought I had done this earlier but I guess Facebook changed its protocols so the import stopped working at some point in time. *shrug* No big deal, I have once again configured up my Facebook account to read and post any blog posts I make to my Facebook Wall.

If all goes well and nothing breaks, people on Facebook will be able to see this post on Facebook instead of having to visit the blog. Although I would rather that people visit the blog directly instead of viewing on FB because I don’t know if the comments (if any) made on Facebook for a post will be synced to the Blog or not. I guess I should try and figure out a two way sync between the two. Or maybe not. Lets see.

Let me know if you hit any errors or issues.

– Suramya

September 14, 2011

Updating the website

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:09 PM

Just realized that the suramya.com site is a mess right now. Parts of it are version 5 (the latest), parts are v4 and there are even a couple of v3’s scattered around. So what I will be doing over the next few days is taking the content from the v3 &v4 pages and moving them to the new version 5.1. This new layout should be a lot nicer, faster to load and easy to maintain.

This time to prevent me from getting distracted, I will not be updating the content while updating the layout, which is what I did previously and when I ran out of time the update/migration stopped. However once the new layout is live I will start updating the content as well, mainly the About Me, Tech, Linux and Photogallery sections really need to be updated.

I will be updating the site on my local system first before pushing it out to the webserver, so look for a new version of the site by the end of the month.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

September 4, 2011

Upgrading my Desktop Hardware & Software

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:46 PM

Hey Everyone,

I am back. Yes, I was missing for almost a year. No, I won’t make excuses for why that happened. Moving on…

I have been having issues with my primary desktop for the past few months now, to the point where I was mainly using my GalaxyTab for most of my browsing/watching movies etc at home. It kept telling me that my Hard drive died so I decided to spend some time reinstalling Linux on a new drive. After I finished backing things up the system suddenly decided that none of my disks existed anymore and wouldn’t even detect them during boot-up. 🙁 So I connected the drives to an external case and plugged them into my laptop and they worked fine. This is when I decided that the problem had to be with the motherboard (as I had changed everything else: SATA cables, Hard drives etc)

So I went out and bought an AMD Phenom II x6 1055T processor and ASUS M4A88T-M Motherboard to put it in. Got everything assembled and then realized that the new board uses DDR3 RAM while my previous one had DDR2 RAM so had to go buy a 4GB DDR3 RAM chip. Finally got everything working and am now a proud owner of a working desktop. Had some issue with the Network card but was easily resolved. Will document the steps on the wiki later.

I have installed Debian 6.0 on the new system and then upgraded it to Debian Unstable (sid). The process is not as straight forward as usual and if you are not familiar with Linux its easy to get stuck. I hit a couple of snags that required me to search online for fixes and yes I will be documenting those as well in my next post. In the end all worked out and the server is stable and works without issues. Might try to overclock the CPU later to see how that goes, lets see.

Lastly, I upgraded wordpress on suramya.com to the latest version which unfortunately broke the theme I was using so the blog has a different layout right now than normal. I will be fixing this over the next few days.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 27, 2010

Error 500 messages on the Site

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:33 AM

I seem to be getting a lot of “Error 500 – Internal server error” messages on the site, especially the blog. No idea right now whats causing it, but its late and I am tried so I will take a look at it tomorrow. (rather today… but later when I am not feeling so brain-dead)

Plus to make things even more fun, my net connection seems to be acting up. I guess its because of the underwater cable maintainence that Airtel is doing. Hopefully it will be sorted by morning.

– Suramya

April 26, 2010

Launching new Section: books.suramya.com

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:27 PM

As you probably know I read a lot and I have a rather eclectic selection of books I read. Over the past few years a lot of people have asked me for recommendations and reviews of books I have read. I got tired of giving individual recommendations and decided to create this section to solve that problem.

Basically the way it will work is the following: When I read a book I write down a couple a paragraphs about the book and whether I liked it or not and that gets posted to this site. BTW keep in mind that this site contains my personal views about the book. Your views might differ so its possible that you don’t like a book that I recommend.

Check out the new Section at: Books.suramya.com

Currently there are 37 reviews on the site with more being added everyday. By the way, If like reading and are interested in writing reviews for the books you read do contact me and we will work something out.

– Suramya

April 3, 2010

Made some of the new/updated sections of the site live

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:58 AM

After thinking about it for a couple of days I have decided to make the part of the new/updated site live (Using http Temp redirection).

At this time the following sections are live with the new content and layout:

* me.suramya.com (The Friends list needs to be updated.)
* india.suramya.com
* hotlinks.suramya.com
* mirror.suramya.com
* misc.suramya.com

linux.suramya.com is updated partway so I haven’t made that section live yet.
The Site news sidebar on the new site still has to be coded, once done it will pull the latest site news from this blog.

Well this is all for now. Let me know what you think of the new layout/content.

– Suramya

February 1, 2010

Update on the Website update process

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 4:01 AM

A little while ago I posted that I was in the process of updating the actual content of the site along with the layout. The process is still going on and this is a quick status update on it. I am adding a lot new content to the site which is why its taking so long to complete.

Currently the following sections have been completed:

* Home
* About Me
* About India (all subsections)
* Hotlinks
* Misc Section

I am in the process of updating the Linux section and once that’s done the following sections will remain:

* Mirror
* Photogallery
* Scripts
* Tech Section

The Tech section will take the longest out of all the remaining because of all the sub-sections but the other sections shouldn’t take that long to update.

Will keep you posted on the status.

– Suramya

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