After disabling php-cgiwrap, I got in the bad habit of chmod’ing files and directories to 777. Bad idea. A helpful reminder about WordPress file permissions and security got me back in line with 755 for directories, 644 for plugins and core WP PHP files, and 666 for my active theme files.
In so doing, I’ve had to disable WP-Cache, but since the site seems to be peachy since I switched back to using the PHP Apache module (default), I think the performance/availability will be fine.
Related security tidbit: Using require() with an external file to increase security on wp-config.php’s database password storage.
(more…)
My site is hosted with Pair. Recently, I had been having lots of problems with PHP exceeding the allocated 16 megs of memory and being killed by Pair’s monitoring scripts — sometimes 3 or 4 times an hour.
I fixed the problem and thought I’d share for anyone else in my situation.
(more…)
If you’re on WordPress and are using a lot of plugins, chances are that your blog is slower. No, not because of the plugins’ functions — that’s easily mitigated by WP-Cache — but because each of the plugins is inserting its own JavaScript and CSS into your blog. This causes users to have bigger page downloads and more HTTP requests, slowing everything down.
Note: This tutorial is for advanced users. Be careful! I screwed my blog’s commenting up for a while after posting this. :) I do not recommend messing with scriptaculous stuff — just leave it be. If you’re a novice, you probably don’t care about your site being a little bit slower, so this isn’t worth the effort.
Background
The best thing to do is to consolidate your CSS and JavaScript into singular files. This isn’t always possible — sometimes, the contents of included CSS and JavaScript depend on variables set in the plugins — but usually the included JavaScript and CSS are static.
(more…)
I recently moved a friend’s medium-size blog from Blogger to hosted WordPress (on DreamHost, not WordPress.com), and I thought I’d share a few tips for making the transition smooth.
(more…)