Tag Archives: troublehooting

Broken Link Contest

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Help me clean up this mess — and maybe win a prize.

I’ve been building content on this site since 2003. In eight years, I’ve collected a lot of junk.

Broken Link ImageAs I revise this site, I’m going through every single post, deleting the ones I don’t think are relevant anymore, and fixing up the ones that remain. Along the way, I hope to hunt down and destroy all broken links.

But I’m only one person and can only check so many links in a day. So I’m asking for your help. And I’m willing to reward the folks who help me most with a free copy of any one of my books still in print.

Here’s how you can enter to win:

  1. Browse the site as you normally would.
  2. When you find a broken link*, open the comment for this post. (I put a link to it in the sidebar so it’s easy to find.)

    3. Check all the preceding comments to make sure your broken link isn’t already listed. I can’t give points for duplicate entries!

  3. If the broken link isn’t already listed, use the Comments form at the bottom of the page to enter the following information:
    • Your name and email address. (This might not be necessary if you’ve already commented here.) Please use your real email address; I will use it to contact you if you’re a winner. I will not share your address with anyone else or spam you. I promise.
    • The URL of the page where you found the broken link. It must begin with http://www.mariaguides.com/ — I’m not interested in rewarding folks for finding broken links on other sites.
    • The URL of the broken link. The easiest way to get this information is to either Control-Click (Mac OS) or Right-Click (Mac OS or Windows) on the broken link and use the Copy Link Location command in the contextual menu that appears. You can then paste it into the comment form.
  4. Submit the comment.
  5. Repeat as necessary. The more broken links you report, the better your chances of winning.

When I approve the comments — all comments are moderated here — I’ll check your findings. If you’ve correctly identified a broken link, you’ll score a point and I’ll note that in a reply to your comment.

At November month-end, I’ll award prizes to the top broken link finders.

Does this sound like a plan? I hope so. l could really use the help.

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* A “broken link” is a link on a Web page that, when clicked, displays a “Page Not Found” error or something similar. In other words, it doesn’t display what it should for whatever reason.

Photoshop CS3 and Mac OS 10.6.3 Potential Problems

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Having a problem? This might help.

After updating my Mac to Mac OS 10.6.3, I found that I could not successfully open Photoshop CS3. Although the program would go through what seemed like the entire startup process, it would unexpectedly quit right before it opened a document. There was nothing I could do to prevent this.

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper.

I started troubleshooting with a Google Search. Two pages were particularly helpful:

  • http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2382232&tstart=0 This thread on the Apple discussions forum contains 167 answers (so far) to the problem experienced by a user. As with most forums, the posts go off-topic to suggest Photoshop alternatives and attempt to place blame on either Apple or Adobe. If you have the time and patience to wade through the posts, however, you’ll discover several potential fixes.
  • http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/834/cpsid_83499.html This TechNote on Adobe.com gets to the meat of the matter without having to wade through a bunch of off-topic nonsense.

Apparently, the problem concerns all Adobe CS3 products and possibly some other software. It did not affect my copy of InDesign CS4.

Adobe provides three possible solutions. I’ll present them here in the order I think you should tackle them.

Disable Opening with Rosetta

Adobe suggests that you turn off the “Open Using Rosetta” check box in the Info window for Photoshop CS3 (or any other program that might be experiencing the problem. In the Finder, select the application’s icon. Then choose File > Get Info or press Command-I. In the General area of the Info window, turn off the check box labeled Open using Rosetta. Close the Info window. This was not the source of my problem, so I can’t verify whether this will help.

Obtain a New Serial Number

Adobe claims that the problem might have something to do with an invalid serial number registered for the computer. This is most likely to happen if your computer was serviced by Apple, perhaps to replace the logic board or some other major component. Per Adobe:

When launching Adobe CS3 applications on Apple’s Mac OS 10.6.3, the applications crash, or quit unexpectedly. This only occurs on systems where the system serial number is a value with more than 12 characters. This appears to only be the case when the system serial number doesn’t have a valid number, but instead has a value such as “System Serial#”, or “SystemSerialNumb”.

About this MacHow do you find the serial number registered by your computer? The easiest way is to choose Apple > About This Mac to display the About this Mac window for your computer. Click the Version number info right under where it says Mac OS X twice. The Version number will change to the Build number and then to your serial number as it is registered inside the computer.

When I originally read this and checked it against my serial number, I did not think this was my problem. After all, Adobe says it happens with serial numbers “more than 12 characters” in length. Mine was 11 10. And that was my problem. When I had my logic board replaced about a year and a half ago, the Apple genius entered an invalid serial number for the new logic board. He basically left out one character. Something in the Mac OS X 10.6.3 update triggered a serial number validation routine in CS3 products. When it came up with an invalid serial number, it refused to run Photoshop CS3.

The solution is not one you’ll like if you don’t have an Apple store nearby. This morning, I’ll be driving 50 miles to get the correct serial number entered into my Mac by a “genius.”

Revert to Mac OS X 10.6.2 or Earlier

Adobe suggests this as the first alternative. Downgrading operating system software is never something I recommend as a first option. After all, eventually you’ll have to upgrade again. Why not try to fix the problem if you can?

But if you can’t fix the problem any other way, downgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.2 might be the way to go. You can find instructions for downgrading at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2597.

Are You Having This Problem?

If you’re having this problem, I’d like to hear from you. What software was affected? How did you resolve the problem? Add your comment to this post.

Please limit your comments to this topic. Rants against Apple or Adobe or suggestions on what software is better than Photoshop will not be approved.

Beware of Smith Micro Mac Software

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A quick warning to Snow Leopard users.

I just spent the past day and a half working on a 4,000-word article for one of my publishers about ways you can reduce hard disk clutter. (I’ll share the link when the article goes online in about a month.) As part of the article, I checked out two Smith Micro software products: Spring Cleaning 10 and Internet Cleanup 5. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted installing any software as much as I regret installing these two products.

First, I should mention that the process of obtaining a 30-day demo copy of Spring Cleaning 10 requires you to provide a credit card number up front. Although the Web site offers a PayPal option, it simply does not work — and customer service is clueless about the problem. It took me three tries to get the software. In the end, after two hours of frustration, download instructions finally arrived. Even those weren’t clear; I still had to hunt around for the download link.

While I’m not sure which of the two products caused the problems I encountered, I suspect it may have been Internet Cleanup. This software purports to help protect you from malware and spyware. It installs files all over your computer, including files that interact directly with your system files. After installing either it or Spring Cleaning, my Mac began suffering kernel panic crashes every time I shut down.

If you’re not familiar with a kernel panic, it appears as a sweep of darkness over the face of your computer screen, from the top to the bottom. The computer becomes completely unresponsive. A message in four or five languages appears, instructing you to shut down your computer by holding down the power button until the computer stops running. You can then restart. When I restarted, a dialog asked if I wanted to report the problem to Apple. Clicking the Show Details button in that screen displays some gibberish that helps Apple’s tech people understand what went wrong. In every case, the name SmithMicro appeared among the gibberish — proof that the software was causing the problem.

I uninstalled both programs. For Internet Cleanup, I used AppZapper, which appeared to delete all the files. For Spring Cleaning, I used the uninstaller that came with the program. Unfortunately, the kernel panic errors continued to plague my system.

Even a “genius” at the Apple Store was baffled. In the end, he reinstalled Snow Leopard from scratch for me. The problem went away. Two files appeared in an Incompatible Software folder after the reinstallation. Both referred to Smith Micro software.

I’m writing this post to warn users of potential problems. No one wants their computer screwed up so badly that a system software reinstallation is necessary.

I’ve written to the folks at Smith Micro to advise them of my experience. I have not received a response. Customer service did tell me that my credit card would not be charged for the software, which I have since fully deleted. There is no mention of Snow Leopard compatibility — or incompatibility — for either of these products on the Smith Micro Web site.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.9: Getting Your MySQL Database Up-to-Date

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A tiny glitch for those of us with old databases.

Upgrade Admin PanelOne of the things I love about the most recent releases of WordPress is the automatic upgrade feature. Not only does the software tell you when a new version is available, but it offers a one-click upgrade through the use of the Upgrade Automatically button in the Upgrade WordPress administration panel. I’ve been using this feature regularly since it first appeared — after backing up my WordPress database and content files, of course — and have never had a problem.

Until yesterday.

Last night, when I attempted to upgrade my main blog, An Eclectic Mind, I got the following error message:

Old PHP Warning

I knew immediately why this error had appeared. My blog is so old that MySQL 5 wasn’t available when it was created. The available version was 4.0.27, which is what I installed. But the new version of WordPress needs a newer version of MySQL. Upgrading wouldn’t be possible until I upgraded my MySQL database.

I called GoDaddy, my hosting company, and spoke to someone in technical support. She said that the only way to upgrade the database was to back up my database, create a new database with version MySQL 5.0, and restore the old database to the new database file. I could then point my config.php file to the new database and, with a lot of luck, everything would work out fine.

So I initiated a backup last night using GoDaddy’s backup utility. (I usually use the WordPress Backup Plugin.) I got tired of waiting for it to finish, and went to bed. This morning, I’m restoring that database into a new file created with MySQL 5.0. And now, as I type this, I’m modifying the config.php file to point to the new database, user name, and host name.

Drum roll please….

As I open the home page for my blog…it works!

Upgrade CompletedThe upgrade should now go off without a hitch — which it does, as shown here.

Unfortunately, if you’re in the same boat I was in, you’ll need to find out how to update your MySQL database file. Talk to your system administrator or ISP’s technical support department. Every system is different — I use GoDaddy.com so that’s the only system I know how to update. Providing detailed step-by-step instructions for that system would only help other GoDaddy users — and might not work after GoDaddy’s next interface revision.

So I’ll let you track down instructions for your server or ISP on your own. Once you get those instructions, it shouldn’t be difficult to complete the task.

Good luck and enjoy the newest version of WordPress!

Repair Your Hard Disk with Disk First Aid

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How to launch Disk Utility so you can use its First Aid features on your internal hard disk.

Note: This article is an update of one I wrote way back when Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was released. The instructions here apply to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and will likely apply to most future versions of Mac OS.

Disk Utility IconMac OS X includes a utility called Disk Utility, which can be found in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. This program offers features for verifying and repairing permissions and disks, erasing and partitioning volumes, creating and working with disk images, and using RAID.

Disk First Aid

Of this bunch, the First Aid features of Disk Utility are something you might want to check out if you haven’t already. I like to use this feature to clean up file permissions and repair minor directory damage on my hard disks on a regular basis. The trouble is, to use the disk repair features on your startup disk, you can’t start up from that disk or run the software from that disk.

And therein lies the problem: how do you repair your hard disk with Disk Utility if you can’t access the repair feature when you start it from your hard disk?

The answer is on your Mac OS X installation DVD. That disc, which includes the Disk Utility software, can be used to start your computer.

Those of you who have above average knowledge of the installation discs may be scratching your heads. You know that when you start a computer with a Mac OS X installation disc, the Installer application automatically runs. When you use the Installer’s Quit Installer command, the Finder does not appear. Instead, the installer tells you it will restart your computer. So how do you launch Disk Utility?

I’ll tell you.

First of all, you know how to restart your computer from a bootable DVD, right? Insert the DVD and then do one of the following:

  • Use the Startup Disk pane of the System Preferences application to identify the disc as your startup disk.
  • Restart your computer with the Option key held down, select the DVD when the startup disk icons appear, and press Return.
  • Restart your computer with the C key held down.

Wait for your computer to restart from the DVD. Then:

  1. In the first dialog that appears, select your language and click the forward arrow button.
  2. Wait while the installer prepares the installation. Don’t worry; it’s not changing anything on your hard disk.
  3. When the menu bar appears, choose Utilities > Disk Utility.

Disk Utility opens. You can then use its First Air features on your internal hard disk.

When you’re finished:

  1. Choose Disk Utility > Quit Disk Utility or press Command-Q to quit.
  2. When the installer appears, choose Utilities > Startup Disk.
  3. When Startup Disk appears, select your hard disk icon and click Restart.
  4. Click Restart in the confirmation dialog that appears.

Your computer restarts from your hard disk.

It’s in the Book!

Snow Leopard Book CoverYou can find more information about hard disks and using Disk Utility with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.:

  • Storage Media is covered in Chapter 6, pages 97-126.
  • Mac OS Utilities is covered in Chapter 24, pages 569-594.

Word 2004 Does Not Like Mac OS X 10.5.8

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It may be time to update Office.

I just started work on a new book revision. The project requires me to take relatively lengthy, style-laden Word documents, turn on the Track Changes feature, and edit like crazy. It wasn’t long before I was pulling my hair out.

You see, the other day, I updated my iMac from 10.5.7 to 10.5.8. I suspect that something in that update just didn’t sit well with Word 2004, which I was still running on that computer. After all, the iMac has an Intel dual core processor. Office 2004 was written for the old PowerPC processor that came in older Macs. Whether the problem was Mac OS X’s inability to run the old PowerPC application or Word’s inability to run on the 10.5.8 update is a mystery to me. All I know is what I experienced: text editing so slow that I could type faster than Word could display the characters.

Revisions, RevisionsAt first I thought it might be the document itself. It’s 40 pages of text that utilizes about 20 styles and fields for automatically numbering figures and illustrations. The document was originally created about 10 years ago and has been revised and saved periodically for every edition of this book. It pops from my Mac to an editor’s PC and back at least five times during each revision process. I thought it might have some internal problems. So I used the Save As command to create a new version of the document. The new file was about 5% smaller in size, but had the same symptoms as the original.

Next I sent it over my network to my new 13-inch MacBook Pro. That computer’s processor isn’t as quick as my iMac’s and it has the same amount of RAM. The software on that computer was different, though. I had a developer preview version of Snow Leopard installed and, in preparation for a Microsoft Office 2008 project I’ll be starting in the fall, I’d installed Office 2008 with both major updates. I opened the file on that machine and it worked just fine. Great editing and scrolling speed. Exactly what I needed.

So I bit the bullet and installed Office 2008 on my iMac. And the two major updates. And two smaller updates that became available on August 5. It took hours — the updates totaled over 400 MB of downloads and I’m connected to the internet on a horrible 600-800 Kbps connection that likes to drop. (I’m living in a motel right now, traveling for my helicopter business.)

The result: All the performance issues are gone. Word is snappy yet again on my iMac.

You might ask why a person who writes about Microsoft Office applications had not yet upgraded to Office 2008. This all goes back to last year’s revision on this project. I actually did upgrade but then I downgraded. It was mostly because I needed the macro feature of Word, which wasn’t available on Word 2008. I’d upgraded my iMac last year, but when I decided to reformat my hard disk to ward off computer issues I was having (which were apparently caused by a bad logic board), I reinstalled Office 2004 instead of 2008. You see, I liked the old version better.

But it’s obvious to me now that I need to keep moving forward with the rest of my technology if I want it to perform as designed. Everything must be in sync. If I want to keep using Word 2004, I should use it on a computer that has the system software available during Word 2004′s lifespan. My old 12-inch PowerBook would be a good example. It has a G4 processor and runs Tiger. That’s as advanced as it will ever get. Office 2004 is a perfect match for it.

If there’s a moral to be taken away from this story, it’s simply that if you want your hardware and system software to be new or up-to-date, there will come a time when you’ll have to update the applications that run on it. Bite the bullet and do what you have to. It’ll be worth it.

Canon LiDE 30 Scanner with Photoshop CS3 on Intel Mac

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Not a good combination.

I finally got around to installing my Canon LiDE 30 scanner — I know it’s cheap junk, but that’s all I need — on my iMac. Much to my surprise the driver installer didn’t see Photoshop as a place to install a plugin. So I manually installed it And then it wouldn’t work.

So there goes another hour of my time to troubleshooting the problem.

It appears that Canon doesn’t have an Intel-native plugin for the scanner. The plugin was written for Power PC Macs. And Photoshop CS3 won’t run Power PC plugins on an Intel Mac.

This explains why the setup worked perfectly well on my Dual G5 (did I mention it’s for sale on eBay?) but won’t work on my new iMac.

I found information for a workaround on the Adobe forum. (Can you believe actually found helpful troubleshooting information on Adobe’s site?) The topic title is Scanner not recognised in Photoshop CS3. Someone named Buko suggests running Photoshop in Rosetta and explains how to do it:

do a get info on the CS3 application and check the start in Rosetta button

Photoshop InfoI followed these brief instructions (see screenshot) and restarted Photoshop. And guess what? It worked.

Rosetta is an Apple technology that makes it possible to run non-Intel native or non-Universal Mac OS applications on an Intel Mac. As this Info window illustrations, Photoshop gives you the option of running Photoshop in Rosetta when necessary to ensure support for older plugins. You can turn this option on before you start Photoshop to access otherwise incompatible software-driven features. You can turn the option off and restart Photoshop when you don’t need those features.

I’m no under-the-hood programming expert, so I was wondering what the pitfalls of running Photoshop in Rosetta were. I Googled and found an article on tuaw.com titled, “Photoshop seems to run fine in Rosetta.” Although the article is nearly 2 years old, I agree that Photoshop seems to work okay.

The suggestion on the Adobe support forum was to run Photoshop in Rosetta only when you expect to scan something. This is probably a good idea, especially if you do a lot of intensive graphics processing. But there are other ways to scan that don’t require Photoshop at all. The CanoScan Toolbox software, which comes with the scanner, works fine and can send the image to Photoshop to be opened. That seems to be a good workaround, especially if, like me, you don’t scan often.

File Sharing: Tiger & Vista, Part 2

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A solution for Vista network connection to Macintosh problems.

Back in December, 2005, I wrote an article titled “File Sharing: Tiger & Vista,” in which I reported my efforts in getting my Dual G5 running Tiger to talk to my Dell laptop running Vista. As that article explains, I was able to set up Vista so Mac OS could connect and access the Dell’s files. But I was unable to get Vista to connect to the Dual G5 to access the Mac’s files.

I won’t bore you with my attempts to resolve this problem. It was very frustrating. Microsoft claimed it was an Apple support issue and Apple claimed it was a Microsoft support issue. You know the drill.

In reading through my feeds today, I stumbled across a post on macoshints.com, “Fix a Vista to Mac failure to connect problem.” The author of the article, shoutdown, had found a thread on the vista64.net forum with instructions for fixing the problem: “Will not accept my password when connecting to WORKGROUP computer.”

I read the thread and followed the instructions. Not only was I able to [finally] connect to my Mac from Vista, but Vista had remembered the password I’d used on all my attempts and just connected me without prompting for a password. What’s even more amazing is that it also allowed me to [finally] set up my shared printer, an HP LaserJet 2100TN directly connected to my G5 via Ethernet, on Vista and even — can you imagine? — print a page!

The problem evidently has something to do with Vista security (what else is new?). From robg on macosxhints.com:

…it seems the problem is that Microsoft has disabled LM and NTLM authentication, which is what OS X’s version of Samba uses. Microsoft’s preferred solution is to upgrade to Samba 3, which supports NTLMv2, as does Vista.

rogb thoughtfully provides the link to the fix for folks running Vista Home versions, which don’t include Administrative Tools. (I’m running Ultimate, for reasons I’m still unclear about, so shoutdown’s link worked fine for me.)

The bottom line: If you want to connect from your Mac to a Vista machine, read my original “File Sharing: Tiger & Vista” article. If you want to connect from Vista to a Mac, start by reading “Fix a Vista to Mac failure to connect problem.”

Mac OS X 10.4.9: Media Eject key delay

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So that’s what’s going on!

One of the first things I noticed after updating Mac OS X Tiger to 10.4.9 was that my CD eject key didn’t seem to work anymore. Normally, I’d just push it and the CD drawer would open. But it just didn’t work like that anymore. Not having time to troubleshoot it, I decided not to update my 12″ PowerBook.

Well, this article on the Apple support site explains it all: “Mac OS X 10.4.9: Media Eject key delay“:

Issue or symptom

After installing Mac OS X 10.4.9, pressing the Media Eject key on the Apple keyboard does not immediately eject media from the optical disc drive nor display the on-screen eject symbol.

Apparently, too many people were pressing that key by accident, thus ejecting media. Apple decided to add a delay to the Media Eject key before it takes effect.

To eject a disc, hold the Media Eject key. The disc will eject normally and the eject symbol will appear.

I just wish Apple had the foresight to mention this change in the update’s release notes rather than requiring us to fish around for the answer online.

So yes, I’ll be updating my PowerBook shortly.

The Importance of XHTML Validation

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When will I ever learn?

Miraz has told me again and again — validate your pages after making changes to your WordPress theme templates. She even advised readers in our book, WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. And every time I validate, I find errors, proving that it’s a step I really do need to take.

Yet I continue to skip this step when I tweak my theme’s template files on every single blog I run.

This morning, I got an e-mail message from someone named Tine who wrote:

I’m completely new to WordPress but found your site because of the book you have made and was curious.

Are you aware that your blog don’t look good in Explorer 6? Some of the text to the left is cut off.

I use Explorer 6 on XP Pro and 1024×768.

Uh-oh.

I fired up my PC and loaded up my home page in Explorer 6. The situation was worse than Tine reported. What appeared did not look much like my site at all. And in the status bar, Explorer was politely telling me that page had errors but didn’t offer any way to find out what they were.

My first instinct was to panic. But then I remembered the XHTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/. I ran the page’s URL through the validator and settled down to find and fix the 110 errors it found.

Sheesh.

The main culprit in this case was some code I’d inserted into my post.php file to display RSS links beside category names in each post’s header. This rather slick piece of coding, which I was pretty proud of, contained the dreaded unencoded ampersand error. That means I’d included & in the code when I should have included & in the code. That error was all over the place, but Explorer seemed to be choking on it in the new code. When I fixed its first occurrence and reloaded the page in Explorer, the page appeared fine, although the status bar smugly reported that there were still errors in the document.

Other problems included <ul> and </ul> tags without <li> and </li> tags. Oops. And <p> tags without </p> tags. (It appears that ecto was causing that problem in the way it codes Technorati tags. Good thing I’m not using tags in my posts anymore.) Of course, all my Amazon.com book cover links were missing alt attributes. And some of my rotating ads used IMG instead of img for coding. The list goes on and on.

Of course, if I’d been validating the XHTML after each template change as Miraz recommends, I would have caught these errors as I introduced them. I wouldn’t have spent my Sunday morning debugging code.

Have I learned my lesson? I think so. At least for a few days.

Stop Pinging Your Own WordPress Blog!

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A problem resolved becomes a new problem to resolve.

A while back, I complained that the ping and trackback features on my site wouldn’t work. I could get trackbacks and pingbacks, but I couldn’t send them. I even wrote a TrackBack Troubleshooting post about it which has become one of the most widely read posts on my site.

A while later, I moved my blogs to GoDaddy.com. Immediately, the trackback/pingback feature began working. And it’s been working ever since.

Trouble is, when I refer to a older blog entry in my own blog from a new blog entry, the new entry pings the old one, thus creating a trackback “comment.” The comments are ugly and relatively meaningless. Yes, they do provide a forward link to the new and related content, but they also appear in my recent comments list, thus making it look as if I’m the only one who ever comments on my posts. (Not true, but it certainly feels that way sometimes.) And I’m not convinced that the forward link is necessary.

So today I searched the help forums at WordPress.org to see if there was a solution. The answer appeared in a topic titled “How do I stop links to other posts in same weblog producing a pingback?”

There were actually several answers. The simplest was to omit the domain name from the link, creating a relative path:

To summarise, when linking to your own posts, use a relative path, not the full path.

So instead of

I wrote this yesterday

Use this:

I wrote this yesterday

Do that, and you won’t get a ping.

Sounds like an easy enough solution.

But my solution of choice was to use the No Self Pings Plugin available from blogwaffe.com:

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.

Two ways to do the same thing. Take your choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to delete all the self-pings that have accumulated on this site in the past few months.

Apple’s “Two-Button” Mouse

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Mighty Mouse and fix.

Apple StoreWhile checking my RSS feed subscriptions today (I’m really trying hard to make that part of my regular routine), I ran across this article at MacOSHints.com: “One possible fix for a broken Mighty Mouse right click.” In it, the author (luomat) writes:

I bought myself a wireless Mighty Mouse during Apple’s Black Friday sale. For the life of me, I could not get the right-click to work, even after enabling it in the System Preferences panel. I tried tapping all over the place on the right side of the mouse and it worked maybe one out of twenty times as I muttered “Why couldn’t they just build a real two-button mouse?”

His brief article goes on to discuss the fix.

Apple Mighty MouseUnfortunately, I’m going to have to buy a Mighty Mouse just so I can write about it in my upcoming Leopard book. As I’ve learned over time, if you don’t have certain hardware installed, certain options related specifically to that hardware just doesn’t appear. (Hence, the need for 3 iPods over the past 5 years. Sheesh.)

But I agree with luomat: Why can’t they just build a real two-button mouse?

Troubleshooting at 6 AM

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A plugin goes bad and causes weird side effects.

I was checking e-mail and moderating comments on this blog early this morning. (I’m a morning person.)

I’d just entered a comment on my blog when I got a weird error message that I didn’t really pay attention to. When I moved on to another page, there were 8 lines of gibberish above the header. On every page I viewed. Before Firefox said, “To hell with this,” and crashed. Several times.

I had a problem.

Netscape could view the page — but with the gibberish.

wickenburg-az.com, which lives on the same server and uses the same software, worked fine. (Whew!) That narrowed it down a bit.

I restarted the computer. The problem didn’t go away.

I accessed the server from home and restarted Apache. The problem didn’t go away.

Dang.

I went to the office at 7:30 AM and restarted the server computer. The problem didn’t go away.

I analyzed the source code of the bad pages — which would appear on Firefox at the office. (That could be because my office computer has a faster, more modern processor and a heck of a lot more RAM.) It pointed to php files used by WordPress to display pages and do its magic. All the files looked right.

I looked at the contents of the database with CocoaMySQL. It looked okay. But then again, I didn’t look at all the contents. And I really didn’t know what to look at.

I thought it might be the gravatars plug in, which I’d been fiddling with tha morning. I disabled it. And I got a weird error message that might have been the same one I’d gotten earlier that morning. This time I paid attention. It mentioned duplicate headers and a couple of files by name. Hmm.

I took a deep breath and went online to WordPress support. I searched the Codex and support forums. I didn’t find an answer. So I posted a message in the support forum. I made the mistake of including the bad code, so when I saved it, the message got cut off at the bad code. Dumb. I used my back button to revise the message and post it. That created a second message with the same title. Really dumb.

But Samboll, another member, was right on it. He made two suggestions. The second one pointed to a Codex document that explained why the header error message might appear. I thought the header error message was a secondary problem — the first was the gibberish characters — so I didn’t have much hope in it solving the problem. But I had nothing else to go on, so I read the Codex piece and followed its instructions.

And that’s how I tracked down the bad file: srg_clean_archives.php, which is the plugin for the Archives feature I installed the other day. When I opened the file, it was filled with junk.

Now I don’t know how the file went bad, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was bad. It didn’t even show up in the list on the Plugins administration panel. I deleted it (it took two tries) and reloaded the site’s home page. Voila! Problem solved.

Of course, now my Archives page didn’t work right.

So I went back to Sporatic Nonsense’s Clean Archives 1.5 page and downloaded a fresh copy of the plugin. I installed it, activated it, and everything is back to normal.

Total time lost to this problem and troubleshooting (not counting the time to write about it): about 2 hours.

The moral of this story: pay attention to error messages.

Trackback Troubleshooting

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I spend most of a day trying to figure out why I can’t send trackbacks from my blog.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m working on a book about WordPress with Miraz Jordan. We split the chapters down the middle, with me getting the first half and Miraz getting the second. One of my chapters covers comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, three features of WordPress that allow feedback and interactivity between blogs and readers.

On my two WordPress-powered sites, the comments feature works fine. A bit too fine, in fact, as the sites quickly became victims of comment spam. Fortunately, Dr. Dave makes a great comment spam prevention plugin for WordPress called Spam Karma and that catches about 99% of the spam aimed at my two sites. I can easily catch the rest using WordPress’s built-in moderation tools. I’ll be covering all this information in detail in Chapter 4 of our book.

I never really experimented much with the trackback and pingback features. Rather than going into a long, detailed explanation of what these features are, if you’re interested (and can’t wait for the book), you can visit the WordPress Trackback Tutorial on Optiniche.com.

One thing I will point out here is that pingbacks are automatic notification of a blog that your blog refers to it. For example, so far I’ve provided links to two specific blog entries (one on Dr. Dave’s site and one on Optiniche). Because WordPress is configured to automatically notify compatible sites when you link to them, a comment should be created for blog entry I linked to, providing an excerpt from my post and other information. You can see an example on this site from Miraz in the comments on this post. Even the link I just created to my own blog entry should result in a pingback to my blog.

Unfortunately, none of this is working. And yesterday, I spent a good part of the day troubleshooting to find out why. After all, it’s difficult to write about something when you can’t get it to work right.

Don’t get me wrong — I know exactly how it should work. I’ve probably read more about the trackback feature in the past two days than most WordPress users read in their lifetimes. And I tortured Miraz yesterday by asking her to trackback and pingback to my site to make sure I could receive these. (I can.) I just can’t send them.

Oddly enough, I attempted to create a trackback from my demo WordPress.com blog. It appeared to go to its destination, but it never showed up there.

In troubleshooting, I found two possible problems mentioned in the WordPress Codex, both of which will require a visit to the server where the sites reside.

First, there’s some indication that the pings might be “stuck” in a queue, resulting in an endless loop while WordPress tries to send them. I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me if that there was some kind of loop thing going on, WordPress would be bogged down by the effort. Yet my two sites seems to perform okay. Still, the cure seems to be to use some MySQL commands to flush out the contents of the to_ping field. Since I don’t think it will hurt anything to do this, I’ll give it a try.

Other people experiencing this same problem claim that this does not help. One person believes it has to do with a blog getting very large and a memory problem resulting. I can believe this with my blogs. Although I only have about 400 entries in each, the entries in this blog tend to be very lengthy. Add to that my love of customization via plugin and you have a very busy WordPress trying to do all kind of things with lots of data. To fix this, I need to visit my server and make some changes to the php.ini file. (I already tried modifying .htaccess, as the article suggests, but that doesn’t appear to help.)

I’m also thinking at this point that it may have something to do with a recently installed plugin. On this site, my automatic database backup stopped working, although it continues to work reliably on wickenburg-az.com.

Am I pushing WordPress too hard? Perhaps. Hopefully I’ll resolve this problem soon so I can back to work.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for me, please don’t keep them to yourself.