PigPog

…and we’re running WordPress.

It’s been an unpleasant time.  We’ve had to get the RAM upgraded in our server, but we don’t really know what else has gone on.  In the process of the troubleshooting, we migrated the site from Drupal to WordPress, and I think we’ll be sticking with WordPress now.  Drupal was great, but the site is really just a blog now, and that’s what WordPress does best.

I used to love it when things went wrong. It was an excuse to sit poking a computer for hours on end. Now, I want to leave the computer behind at least some of the time, and go outside. Being tied to the computer, and working late trying to fix a broken database isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I hope things keep working, and don’t need too much maintenance for a while now.

Update3: The problem never stayed away, and got worse. I tried upgrading to Drupal 6.x, but our hosting has such an old version of MySQL that we can’t run Drupal 6.x. I then tried a fresh installation of Drupal 5.x, fetching the current version of every module we need, and enabling things gradually. So far, things are pointing at the search module again, but I only stopped the problems by deleting the search module and emptying all the search tables. Disabling the module didn’t stop lots of locked processes updating the search_index table. We’ll see how things go from here, then.

Update2: Running without the Image module didn’t fix it – it happened again. We now have the Image module enabled again, and a few other modules disabled. PathAuto is included in this lot, as I’ve heard it can have performance issues with a lot of paths (we have over 1,000). If things stay stable this way, I’ll probably try updating PathAuto to the latest version and enabling it again.

Update: This turned out not to be the case at all. The next batch of images I uploaded were ok, but the next after that caused the same locking problems without the search module running. I’m just going to abandon the image module for now, and maybe have another go when we upgrade to Drupal 6.x.

A GoogleFood post – there’s probably nothing of interest here, unless Google has brought you to this page when you’re trying to work out why Drupal keeps making your server crash, run very slowly, etc, after you’ve added a batch of images.

I think I’ve got to the bottom of this problem now, so I’ll post this in case it’s any help to anyone later.

I was using Drupal 5.x, with the Image module. I was importing images by uploading them using FTP, then using Image Import to grab them from there and add them to the site. When doing that, the first time you view the images after adding them, Drupal has to generate the various sized versions. I always went through viewing each image to let this happen, because it took a while, so I didn’t want visitors wondering why their browser was hanging if they happened to be the first to view an image.

At some point while doing this, the site would stop responding, and I found I couldn’t even stop/start MySQL through my host’s control panel. I had to log a call with them to get things going again. The first time, the database wasn’t working properly afterwards, and some repair was needed.

After a few more tries, I found that what was happening was that MySQL had a number of locked processes. The number of locked processes seemed to grow until it was too much for the server, and MySQL would stop responding. After a while, Apache usually died too.

From the look of it, it’s actually the Search module causing the problem when it tries to index the images. Generating the different sizes is a slow process, and can make things look like they’ve hung for a while, but nothing is locked, so it gets there eventually. Once I disabled the Search module, though, I could set lots of images off to generate sizes, without locking any tables. phpMyAdmin was good for troubleshooting – use Show Processes to see what’s going on. Try disabling the Search module, and see if the problem goes away.

We now have to decide if we can do without the Search module or the Image module. I think Search will probably be the one to go, replaced with a Google search box.

Note: this article is out of date now – it’s not referring to the current design of the site.

Well, anyone who visits reasonably often has probably already noticed that we redesigned again a couple of weeks ago. I’ve finally put aside my dislike of fixed-width designs, and used one. It’s based on the 960.gs implementation, turned into a simple Drupal theme.

The choice of fonts was aided a lot by a couple of articles:

• 8 Fonts You Probably Don’t Use in CSS, but Should
• Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows

Putting these two together, we’ve picked fonts that should display well on all major platforms, and fail over to something reasonable on anything else.

We’re still experimenting a little with the ads. Just a little while ago, we replaced the big ad block in the top left with a random photo. We like the money they bring, but we don’t want to make the site unpleasant to read, either.

Hope you like it – if not, I hope it’s at least readable and not too objectionable.

Another week, another new look for PigPog.

This time, it’s a completely new theme I’ve built, so there’s even more chance that I’ve broken something. It’s all a bit basic, but it feels a bit more like it’s actually ours. I’ve put all the navigation stuff in a couple of reasonably narrow bars on the right, so the content is the first thing on a page.

It’s readable, and shouldn’t be too overloaded with ads, which were two of the problems with last week’s effort. Anyway, as ever, let me know what you think – even if you don’t like it. When it’s a theme built from scratch, it should be a bit easier to change.

Ever since upgrading to Drupal 5.x, we’ve just stuck with the default theme, with just a colour tweak to make it ours. I finally decided to take a bit of time to look at other themes, and found one I quite liked – it’s called Channel Nine (no relation that I’m aware of to the Microsoft thing). I’ve made a few very small changes to the theme, mainly to change the colours.

The idea of a theme without the standard ‘masthead’ top section was quite appealing, and this one seems to cope nicely with different screen widths, too.

As usual, I’ve tried to check things, but I might have broken something – please comment here if you spot something I’ve missed.

I finally got around to working out some of the differences between Drupal 4.x modules and Drupal 5.x modules. Not much of the differences, mind, just enough to get the few custom bits we wanted back on PigPog working.

• The old semi-automatic ads we had that we pop in by just adding a tag or two have returned. OK, so I don’t suppose many people were waiting for us to sort that out. When we redesigned, though, we did go for a less intrusive set of ads generally, losing the big square that poked into the content, and that’s costing us a bit, because that one did get people going clicky. We don’t want it back, though, because the site looks better without it. Putting the little semi-auto ones back should help make up a bit.
• We can now create new GuitarPr0n entries again (and Gary should be able to, too). We still intend to make a better home for GuitarPr0n at some point, but this makes things a bit more liveable-with until then.

The main difference, in case it’s of interest to anyone Google should drop here, is that modules now have to have a .info file as well as the .module file. They’re pretty easy to create, though, just copy and edit one from another module.

• Oh, I’ve set the ads in the right-hand column to be text-only, too. Some of the animated graphic ads were kind of distracting and ugly.

43Folders has just relaunched using Drupal. It’s looking really good so far – Merlin drafted in a few people who actually know what they’re doing with Drupal, where PigPog just had me and a poking-stick to try to make things work. If you’re into productivity pr0n and GTD stuff in any way, I’m sure you’re already a big fan of Merlin’s site, but it’s certainly worth going and having a fresh look.

Well, that was certainly a day of big changes for PigPog. I hate doing upgrades to the site, because all it takes is something very small to go wrong, and there’s a lot at risk. It all went reasonably smoothly, considering how much was happening.

• I upgraded Drupal to version 5.x.
• I switched PigPog to use the new default theme, and customised the colour scheme. I always feel a bit bad about not making a real custom scheme, but this way is so easy, and I’d probably never manage to make anything that matches the default theme’s simple but pretty design.
• I’ve moved the content we don’t want to concentrate on any more to a new section, so it’s not using space in the top bar any more.
• I’ve installed a new Flickr module for Drupal, which makes it a little easier to add Flickr photos to posts, and lets us do a few things with blocks too.
• I’ve tried to give GuitarPr0n its own theme back, but only with limited success.

We need to make a new logo still, and there’s a bit of work to do to make the feeds work as they should, but I’m pretty happy with progress.

Summary: Expect PigPog to change around a bit over the next little while – some things will move, and it may start to look a bit different. It’ll probably take a week or so to settle down, but we’re doing a bit of ‘rebranding’. PigPog is becoming PigPog Visual Arts, and tightening its focus to concentrate on less things, but hopefully to cover them better. We’ll be trying to make it a bit more about us, too (Michael and Sam), and putting more of our stuff out there rather than just talking about it.

If you’re interested in why we’re doing this, and what’s likely to change, keep reading…

If you’re at all regular around here, you’ll probably have noticed that PigPog hasn’t been updated very much in recent times. There’s no shortage of things available for us to cover – anything creative is our area. We have reached the conclusion that this is probably our biggest problem.

The Problem

By focusing on such a wide area, we’ve given ourselves some difficulties:

• If the site was really covering a decent amount of stuff in all the different types of creativity we claim to cover, the stuff on the front page would flow past so fast you’d never see it all. We’d be overflowing people’s RSS readers and getting new content all over their carpets.
• We’re not experts on much of this stuff. We don’t mind covering stuff we’re not really expert at, but we’re trying to cover stuff here that we’ve never tried and have no experience or knowledge of at all.
• If we’re being honest, we’re not even interested in some of these things. Neither of us really have much interest in a lot of the craft stuff we’re trying to cover, which probably makes our writing on the subject truly awful. You’d probably rather read about stuff from someone with some passion for it.
• Even if we were interested, and knew about all this stuff, we just wouldn’t have time to keep updating the site. We both work full time again now, so we only have a limited amount of time to put into the site – especially if we’re going to actually do anything creative rather than just writing about it.

Possible Solutions

So, what to do? We spent some time considering our options, and we had a few ideas:

• Keep the site as is, but get more people to help out with it. Other people could take over covering some of the stuff we know nothing about, and we could keep doing some of the stuff we can do. The difficulty here is finding people who want to spend their time writing for our site, without wanting anything much in return. Then we’d have to manage them and keep track of who was doing what and when.
• Drop the Craft section. This is the biggest problem area for us, so losing it would reduce the problem a lot. We’d still have much too much stuff to cover, though.
• Narrow the focus to just the things we’re really interested in, while keeping a few other ‘side projects’ on the go in another section. This feels like the best choice for us right now.

Change of Focus

What’s the focus going to be? Well, we kind of already gave it away in the summary at the top, but ‘PigPog – Creativity Anywhere’ will be changing to ‘PigPog Visual Arts’. Our biggest area will probably be photography, but touching on other stuff like drawing and painting (so I still have an excuse to go on endlessly about pens).

Changes

The changes will be happening bit by bit, and may take a while to complete. We’re not organised enough to have any sort of test or staging environment for PigPog, so you’ll see the changes as they happen, probably including a few tries at things that don’t quite work out.

• We won’t be deleting much, if anything at all. The content we have now in areas we don’t intend to cover in future will still be here, just not quite as easy to get to. We’ll have a link at the top of the front page to get to the ‘other stuff’.
• URLs shouldn’t change, at least as far as we can avoid it. If you have any articles bookmarked, the bookmarks should still work just fine.
• Our personal stuff – blogs and photos and such like – will come out front a little more. We’ve been hiding a bit, which doesn’t make much sense when PigPog is really about us and what we’re interested in.

Upgrading

We may take the chance to have a go at upgrading the software PigPog runs on, Drupal, to the latest version while we’re doing all this. If you arrive and see blank pages, or database errors and such like, that’s probably why. Just try again after a little while. We’ll try very hard not to break things for too long.

The Future

Well, we don’t really know how things will work out, but we hope this will bring PigPog back in line with what we love doing, which should make it fun for us again. That should mean we actually enjoy updating and adding new stuff.