Innodb tables are tables within MySQL that should be used instead of MyISAM for numerous reasons, the very least is that their transactional nature means they will not corrupt if you system has to reboot or lose power.

One of the problems is to change your tables from MyISAM to Innodb you need to run the following command:
ALTER TABLE YourDB.wp_posts ENGINE=InnoDB;
Once per table and that means lots of manual typing

I found a script that will create the list of tables for you:
SELECT CONCAT( 'ALTER TABLE `', table_schema, '`.`', table_name, '` ENGINE=InnoDB;' )
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE ENGINE = 'MyISAM'
AND table_schema NOT
IN (
'information_schema', 'mysql'
)

Which outputs something like:
ALTER TABLE YourDB.wp_bad_behavior… Read the rest

Just received a invoice payment chaser from Inmotion Hosting. Thought I would share with you why I am not using their service anymore:

We moved off your servers months ago due to having the service turned off randomly, god awful support, and when we complained to your quality assurance department they said that your service was just fine. Well it wasn’t, we’re not on you anymore, and we’re not recommending you to anyone anymore.

While realizing we’re a small fish for you we were much bigger having multiple hosting accounts, a dedicated server and two VPS servers. We used your services for years.… Read the rest

If you’re fed up with your comment form fields not lining up properly here’s how to turn the form fields into a table which you can then use CSS to format.

In your theme’s functions.php file add the following code:

<php
add_action( 'comment_form_before_fields', 'uniquename_comment_form_before_fields' );
function uniquename_comment_form_before_fields() {
      echo '<table id="PostCommentTable">';
}
add_action( 'comment_form', 'uniquename_comment_form' );
function uniquename_comment_form() {
      echo '</td></tr></table>';
}
?>

Then in your comments.php file locate the line that reads ‘comment_form()’ and replace with the following:

<?php
$comment_args = array( 'fields' => apply_filters( 'comment_form_default_fields', array(
       'author' => '<tr><td>' .
       '<label for="author">' . __( 'Your Name' ) .

This took a long time to track down and only applies in specific circumstances:

• Your process is forking
• You are using persistent memcache connections
• The data you request does not match what you receive, for instance you expect an array and an integer is returned.

The problem is caused by the persistent connection being shared after the process has forked. This is a known issue on database connections which is why you should always stop and restart your database connections after a process forks however this is not a documented ‘feature’ of the memcache connections. Trying to close and reopen the memcache connections doesn’t help either.… Read the rest

This one took a while to suss out.

Symptoms are:

• Database connections idle for long periods of time.
• Processes start and then stop intermittently.
• Processes report ‘Killed’ when you run them.
• Running ‘dmesg’ from the command line shows the OMM process was called.

If this is happening to you you need to check your logs to see if the OMM (out of memory manager) is getting called. To check this run ‘dmesg’ from a Unix command line and look for the term ‘OMM’. The OM process kicks in when there is not enough memory to satisfy memory requests (malloc) that the system has already OKed.… Read the rest

OK so I’ve been talking about PHP errors for a while now but one more post. I found some code for customizing error handing in PHP , I installed it and got overwhelmed with emails reporting errors on my sites. I had to spend most of yesterday fixing issues on my sites. Most were minor issues of course – the worse is using uninitialized variables such as $ret = $Data[‘notset’]; where the value in $Data hasn’t been set. In reality the code works and its being pedantic but it still needs fixing with:

$ret = isset( $Data[‘notset’] ) ? $Data[‘notset’] : “” ;

But some reports were real errors, such as unitialised variables that needed a value, referencing arrays using -> instead of [], and other nasties.… Read the rest

That’s me, write a program and it works, don’t bother initializing variables, etc. That was until I moved to a new host that had display errors turned off. It is pretty much impossible to debug without errors being displayed so I went rummaging around for ways around this and found the following code:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set(“display_errors”,1);

I turned this on and suddenly the code was spitting out warnings and messages all over the place. Some trivial but some really fixed issues that I didn’t know. Now I’ve got it turned on all the time in development and on internal systems.

As the ‘Practical PHP Programming’ manual says:
Always set your PHP error level to the most verbose level, E_ALL.… Read the rest