I am still experiencing issues with the server, and I still have the new server to swap it out with. I just have not had the means to do so yet. The issue I keep having is a kernel issue involving swap space. Just this morning while typing a post, the server started to lockup and started kicking errors. Luckily I had an SSH session open that allowed me to kill some services, perform a reboot and get things going again. I am not always that lucky.

As part of that, I will have to add an additional point to the post Why I Fail At Blogging. Another part of the reason I don’t promote as much as I could, nor post is server reliability. You don’t want to start getting tons of traffic, or even a moderate level of traffic if your hosting server is not reliable. Nothing irks me more that trying to get to a site and having it load slow, or worse, not at all.

After looking into this issue more, I have found (surprisingly) if I use Internet Explorer 7 to post on here, the problem happens less frequently that when I use Firefox. Not sure exactly why that is yet, but for some reason when I am using FF, when I am in the admin section typing posts etc. I can see in my SSH session several HTTPD processes, that then start crashing after they keep being spawned and sucking all the available memory and swap space. If I catch it before the swap space is used, I can kill them, restart the service and recover. If not, the server has not option but to be phsyically rebooted.

I am not sure why FF would send so many more HTTP requests than IE would, but that would seem to to be the case at this point in time. Has anyone else experienced this type of issued with WordPress? Leave a comment if you have!

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We all read about bloggers such as Darren Rowse who are highly successful in earning a good living from blogging. We sit and think, get an idea, sit some more, think some more…. Most people desire success in life, whether it is work, family, recreation or some other area such as blogging. The truth of the matter is a larger percentage of “us” fail to attain that success.

I am the poster-child for failure in many areas of life - yet I keep waking up, keep plugging away and keep trying, just as so many of us do. Blogging is just one small failure in my book of life, but I am starting to identify why I fail as a blogger….maybe you share some of these traits, maybe you don’t. Either way, the path to success is full of potholes, set backs and much effort, and in there will be failures - it’s how we handle those failures that determines our future success.

Why I Fail At Blogging - The following list examines what I have identified so far as the reasons I fail at blogging, why after nearly 2 years this blog has less readership, less posts and less reach than blogs that are much newer and what I hope to do about this.

• 1. Commitment
  I completely lack commitment to blogging. While I want to blog, I just never “make” time to blog. Note I did not say “find” time. I never make time. Whether it is taking 20 minutes a day, either first thing in the morning, or before I go to sleep at night, I never make the time to write. Even if I were to write a partial post in that 20 minutes, research a post idea, test a code snippet, it would improve post frequency, which is one of the keys to successful blogging. No one wants to read a blog that is only updated once every 2-3 months, which has often been the case with this blog.
• 2. Vision
  What is the vision for a blog. I have convoluted the vision many times, going to blog about nothing but web development topics. Then I throw in off-topic posts. Maybe I will focus on just PHP, or just CSS, or just creating standards compliant xhtml/html/css sites. Maybe I will focus on MySQL. I put all these topics in my category list, and yet I don’t blog about many of them, because I do not have a clearly defined vision of what I am trying to accomplish on this blog. Maybe if I had a vision, I could figure out the time to devote to number one up there.
• 3. Cynicism
  I read about other’s success. I look at it through a soda bottle, distorted and distrusted. If in fact it is true, it is only they who could accomplish it, not me. I setup for failure before even trying, being pessimistic, and for some odd reason I enjoy this. I, in the back of my mind, wish to fail? What? Yes, and others are out there that do the same. Why? Imagine, if you were someone such as Darren Rowse, who is highly successful. With that success comes accountability. He and Chris Garrett published a book on blogging - which many times indicates that one is a success or expert in what they were published about.

  When viewed in that context, there is accountability that can come along with that. I myself don’t want accountability, or the responsibility that what I write is not going to be raked over the coals and shredded and I may have to justify my position, idea, expertise etc. Do you ever feel that way? Maybe, maybe not. But being cynical of the blogosphere can be good, yet in my case, it is one of my own worst enemies as I am my own worst cynic to myself.

• 4. Lack of Self
  We are taught to rely on ourselves more than others….at least some of us are. In that, one of my biggest struggles is feeling, or better yet, knowing I can accomplish something. Lack of self worth, prior life incidents, too much love, not enough, whatever the cliche you want to attach here is. The bottom line is, we have to know ourselves, know our strengths and weaknesses and not let the weaknesses rule our lives. I can look at myself and I say the following: moron, idiot, stupid, ugly….a complete lack of self. Are we conditioned to feel a certain way about ourselves? Do we do it on our own? One thing about successful people, they portray success, even amidst failure. That self composure of taking a beating, and still looking up. That self composure of being who they are, where they are, how they are is priceless. Who are you? Who am I? I am sheepish, shy, and downright hard on myself - creating a lack of self, which creates a mindset of failure, before I even start a task. Failure is good, it teaches us lessons, it shows us a weakness that we can strengthen and it can guide us to a better purpose or direction. But creating failure before effort is a great way to ensure success will never happen.
• 5. Fear
  Fear of what? I fear success merely for the fact that success brings with it a change, and I fear change even though I have very few constants in life. What do you fear? Something different maybe? The saying goes that the only thing to fear, is fear itself. Seems an infinite loop to me, at least in my life…. Are you afraid of connecting, of putting your foot out there to let it get trampled on? I am sure the likes of Darren and Chris could tell a hundred stories of getting trampled on, whether by someone who is in a position to trample, or someone who is merely jealous, rude or otherwise a crick in societal norm…if there is such a thing of societal norm. Did they take it to heart, quit blogging, quit trying or walk away? If they had, would they be where they are now? I let this fear guide my steps, my actions and my words far too often. What if someone doesn’t like what I write. What if someone knows a better way to do that PHP snippet I just posted…get over it, eh? Yes, well, we all need to take steps in areas, and this area is just another one of mine. Maybe I just need a lesson in “It’s Okay To Be Wrong” or something.

Well, a short list, but the top 5 reasons I have not put in the effort required to actually build this blog, or any of the several other blogs I have attempted to write on. The biggest for me is merely setting the time to do it, and stop “thinking” about it, stop “wishing” about it and to stop “dreaming” about it. Dreams don’t come true to those who only dream, and never “do”. That is one key in common with nearly ever successful person I have ever met or known, they not only dream, they DO.

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This script handled the uploading of files, after a user was logged into the system. Proper validation and security measures need to be taken before using a script such as this. This may include user logins, ip-restrictions or other measures.

The code explanation follows the code below:

Quick Code

The script first sets up the directory path that we want to open, in this case I wanted to open the current path, so I used a period to signify the current working directory. Next, we open the directory using the opendir command passing in the $path variable. We have to loop through the entire directory to get all the files. **Note this script does not take in to account sub-directories.**

At this point, the script tests for the directories . and .. and also to not list the .htaccess file if it is present. Within the file check, we get the last modified date of the file, this is done by doing a date format on the filectime function, which accepts the path/filename combination. The script then simply adds each file to an unordered list, and makes each file name (represented by the $file variable) a link so that they can be clicked on to be viewed or downloaded.

The last important line of code closes the directory handle resource by calling the closedir function.

While simple, this script accomplished reading a directory of files and making a linked list of them. As I mentioned I had this was only presented to users who had successfully logged into the system, presenting them with a list of files they could easily download. It was created as a direct replace for an FTP system that was not working well for users - the entire package was a login control, the file listing control (presented here), a way for the user to upload files back and the automatic deletion of files that were older than a set time frame.

I will post about the other parts of the system in the future, and in the end, wrap it up with a complete user managed file transfer system.

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In testing the script, a sample PNG image with transparency was originally 500×500 pixels and 202.76kb in size. Using the script to set the x,y to 200×200 the file size was reduced to 44.73kb. The script could be easily extended to perform other ImageMagick functions, and to reduce the end result file size even more.

Quick Code

Quick synopsis of the code: It first checks to make sure the imagick PHP extension is loaded, and if it is not, it will dynamically load the extension. It then checks for the URL parameter ‘imagename’ and runs a simple strip_tags to clean any extraneous attempts to send in other code with the image name. The script then does two checks for the size (horizontal) and vsize (vertical). If either is set, it will strip_tags on them and assign them to a variable for use.

The script then takes the sizes and instantiates a new Imagick object passing in the image name as set from the URL parameter. It then calls the thumbnailImage function of the Imagick library and passes in the $size and $vsize variables. We then set the header type to be image/png since we worked only with PNG images in this version, and finally print the results, which are contained in the $image object.

The nice thing about the script, is thumbnail image will take two parameters for the size, and if only one is set, it will auto-constrain the image (eg. 200, 0 it will autoscale the 0 axis). The other nice thing is we can check the type of image so that we output the same type so we can work with GIF, JPEG, and PNG among others.

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A basic Twitter feed might appear like mine below:

Quick Code

As you can see we get a channel name with related information, and then the items, or Tweets. In this case, Twitter has used some duplicate XML tags, namely title, description and link in both the channel element and item elements, so our script should pull only the item information, unless we wanted to publish the channel information, which for this we will not.

Quick Code

What the script does:
Line 2 creates a new instance of an XMLReader object
Line 3 opens the RSS feed from Twitter - the username will be your Twitter user name (or what ever Twitter user name you want to get updates for) and the count URL parameter tells it to only retrieve the latest Tweet. You can ommit the count and get all, or specify another number here.
Line 5 starts a while loop that will loop through the entire contents of the XML file returned from our open command.
Line 7 checks for the node type and if it is equal to an ELEMENT, takes action.
Line 9 sets the value of the Element.
Line 11 Validates the element to be equal to item, item being the element that contains our tweet.
Line 13 begins a new while loops (almost a recursive action here) and moves through the file again, to get the actual Tweet text from within the Item element.
Line 15 again checks that we are working with elements
Line 17 assigns each element to the variable
Line 18 checks the variable to be equal to the elements that we want, description, pubDate and link.
Line 20 tells the object to read the XML/RSS stream
Line 21 appends the $result variable with the values from our selected elements.
Line 34 closes our XMLReader stream.

Now all we need to do is include this into a PHP page, echo or print the $result variable and we will get an output like the following:

Quick Code

As you can see, we have some formatting issues to deal with, such as double spacing between Tweets, maybe formatting the date string, and encasulating the entire tweet with the link so it could be clicked and take the visitor to the individual Tweet on the Twitter web site.

The final page I have it in on my testing server is:

Quick Code

This could definitely not be used for much, but you could also set up a very similar and though not quite as simplistic page to read any RSS feed, thus creating your own PHP RSS/XML reader. It could definitely be extended and enhanced to perform some very advanced functionality as well.

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Use my contact page if you are interesting in discussing any potential opportunities.

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As I have said, I am not too worried about it at this point, because I will be delivering the new server sometime in the next two weeks, so I won’t have to worry about it after that.

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