Kathy_P

My friend did contact Tech Support, and they changed all the folders under wp-content (themes, plugins, uploads, upgrades) to 777. The owner and group are still listed as 571 in Filezilla. I am not sure what that means, but I suspect it means the wrong entity is considered the owner of those directories and the files under them. How should my friend communicate this to Help Desk support? Obviously you can write to a file with 777 permissions, but as you say, 755 should work, and 777 is insecure. What, exactly, should she be asking them to change, and what should she be asking them to change it to?

Earlier this week I helped a friend move her blog to TCH from another, more expensive webhost. We manually installed the most recent version of WordPress using Filezilla and I imported her backed up WordPress database using phpmyadmin. Everything seems to be working well except that she can't upload photos with WordPress's media uploader. It tells her it can't create the file and to check that wp-content/uploads is writable. Well, according to Filezilla and the Cpanel file manager, it is writable. We changed file permissions to 775 on that folder and still had the problem. I am thinking this is a problem with who "owns" the files. Filezilla reports both owner and group as 571. I don't know what that translates to, or what it should be. What should she ask Tech Support to change the file and group ownership to? What should file and folder permissions be set to so that WordPress will function correctly? Right now she has set the uploads folder to 777 and is able to upload photos, but I know this is not secure. However, it is the only permission setting that is working.

Exactly. Caught in the twilight zone of no-one-here-can-figure-it-out. Well, I did submit the whole problem to Akismet, and I'll be working on the plugin end today. Sigh. To be fair, TCH Tech Support went back and looked again after I told them that I was getting an error from UTW, too: I am not as confident as they are that the "vendor" will be able to debug it quickly, but, oh well.

Joefish, Thank you for mentioning those plugins and the Blog Herald. I have been hearing about that place but hadn't checked it out yet. I didn't think it was a TCH issue, either, but I figured I had to ask before going back to Akismet. For anyone who might be interested, I did file a Help ticket and the answer was: But I believe the "get tag suggestions" part of Ultimate Tag Warrior stopped working at the same time (earlier this week). When I click on that button underneath the Write Post box, I get this error: The first time I got that error, I figured Yahoo timed out or something. Now I'm not so sure. My next steps will be to submit the problem to Akismet and UTW and to deactivate all my other plugins and reactivate them one by one.

Joefish, I had checked the Akismet website for that kind of information but didn't know enough to check other places. However, the link you provided made it sound like the trouble was over, and my API key still won't update. Will probably install Spam Karma before the day is out.

I had used Spam Karma prior to Akismet, and somehow it got really screwed up, and kept giving me error messages, and blocking commenters it shouldn't have, etc. Apparently that's all been fixed, if you guys like it so much. But neither of you answered my implicit question, which is, "Does my host block outgoing http requests?"

I have been a longtime user of Akismet and it has always worked great. However, in the last few days I had started getting a lot more spam. Today I finally checked my Akismet options and was surprised to find this message on the Akismet configuration page: Further elucidation at the Akismet FAQ page: So my question is, has TCH done something recently that would cause Akismet to be unable to validate my key? I am on Server 117 and am using WP 2.0.5 and the latest version of Akismet (2.0). I have already tried the other suggestions in the FAQ, such as typing in my API key and waiting a few minutes before trying again. Any other suggestions are appreciated.

WordPress has an option to enable "pretty" or "cruft-free" permalinks. When you do this, it modifies your .htaccess file. If you then attempt to activate HotLink protection or Redirects, Cpanel is all confused by what WordPress put in the .htaccess and gives you an error. I have found the correct code for accomplishing both of these tasks and inserted it in my .htaccess myself, and then it works fine. I don't know if others have had this problem, but it's something to be aware of when a member complains that either of these utilities is "not working."

When you set up an ftp account and specify a folder, does this mean that the users will have access to all folders under that folder? For example, if I set up an account assigned to a folder called Genealogy for family members to share their research, will they have access to subfolders of Genealogy, such as Smith, Jones, Colburn, etc.?

I think that even though they show up in your hotlinks allow list they are not really in the allow list. I use WordPress, which adds a lot of lines to the .htaccess file to make easily read urls. The hotlink manager interface "reads" the .htaccess file and displays lines from it that aren't really part of hotlink protection. See if you can look at your .htaccess file directly and figure out which parts belong to what.

I sent an email to Bloglines. Hadn't thought to check the feed urls myself. I can load them all in my browser. So whatever is going on, I need more information to troubleshoot it. You might be checking the wrong feed at Bloglines, though, because it has certainly been updated since Feb. 5th. http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rss.php http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rss2.php http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rdf.php http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-atom.php The last post I saw in Bloglines was dated Feb. 28th.

Yes, I have it turned on right now. If you can see it just fine, then there must be some other problem. I will send an email to Bloglines. Thanks for the reassurance.

Last week I enabled hotlink protection. After that I noticed that Bloglines.com (the online feed aggregator) displayed an error next to my feed. Over the weekend I made two entries to my blog, and neither one was picked up by Bloglines. In an attempt to figure out if the problem was at my end or their end, I subscribed to my own feed using Thunderbird's built-in feed reader, and it picked up the two blog entries that I wrote after enabling hotlink protection. But I contacted Garden Voices, a reblogger that sends a lot of desirable traffic my way, and she told me that she is no longer getting my feed. She tried to re-subscribe to it, but it told her she was already subscribed. Here is a copy of the part of my .htaccess file that was added when I enabled hotlink protection: >RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://coldclimategardening.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://coldclimategardening.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://weblog.coldclimategardening.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://weblog.coldclimategardening.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.coldclimategardening.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.coldclimategardening.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.weblog.coldclimategardening.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.weblog.coldclimategardening.com$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] Is there something missing or extraneous in there that would be causing problems, or should I look elsewhere?

Yes, it did extract a .com file which was confusing to me, but when I told my text editor to open it, it could. I have to say after looking through the first couple thousand lines using the Find command, I really didn't know anymore than I knew looking at AWstats. I also tried a program called WebLog Expert, which allowed me to filter out everything except Googlebot, which allowed me to see that there wasn't any pattern to the visits. So I actually went to Google itself and read the FAQs here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html . And since my question wasn't answered I filled out the contact form. If I actually hear from them I'll report back.

As best as I can tell, a *.gz is some sort of compressed file. When I said Windows XP couldn't open it, I meant it didn't know how to un-compress it. Once it is uncompressed I am sure I will be able to read it. But I'm still not sure if it is the raw log for the month or just for today. It won't do me much good unless it is the log for the month.

After getting a notice that I was at 80% bandwidth I decided to look at Awstats. Turns out my not-viewed traffic for the month is almost double my viewed traffic, with Googlebot taking by far the biggest bite at 438.76 MB. For comparison, in Nov Googlebot used 165.96 MB of bandwidth and in Oct. it was 67.66 MB. What is going on here? I get the idea I need to look at my raw log files. I clicked on Raw Log File listed under Web/Ftp stats in Cpanel, but the file is .gz which my Windows XP doesn't know how to open. Am I on the right track? If so, How do I open the file? If not, What should I be doing instead? Any other suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.

I have a friend who asked me for a recommendation for a low-cost webhosting service and I was glad to tell her about TCH. She was impressed with the price of the Starter Plan and thought it would meet her needs. But she had a question about email, so I sent her to the help website. She said she gets migraines and that it hurt to look at the website. In her own words: So I was wondering if there was a plain text or lo-fi version of the help site and I guess the main site that lists the plans as well.

With the email service provided by my ISP, it's either POP3 or webmail, IMAP is not an option. But I do have the IMAP option through my account here, and I am wondering what the difference is between the two services. Does one use up more bandwidth than the other? Is one somehow more convenient? Is there a tutorial on this subject that I somehow missed? I use Thunderbird as my email client.

I recently uploaded a bunch of files to the wrong folder. When I discovered my error, I re-uploaded them to the correct folder, and deleted them from the incorrect folder. Everything will delete except a folder called images, which has about 5 jpg files in it. At one point I had enabled Hot Link Protection, so thinking it might be interfering, I disabled it. After that I looked in my .htaccess file and it showed nothing there. Yet I still can't delete this folder, or the image files inside of it. I can't even change permissions on the files. I don't remember ever having this problem before, but I also don't ever remember trying to delete image files before. One thing I have done recently is install WordPress 1.5. I get the impression that earlier versions of WordPress messed around with .htaccess, but I am not sure if this version does or not. Can anyone tell me what is going on, and how I can delete this unwanted folder and its files? I should add that I have tried this with Cpanel's File Manager and also with Smart FTP, the ftp program I usually use to upload files.

I'll get in touch with the creator of the script to see if he can help me troubleshoot it.

I've got it up and running and it seems to be working fine. At least, I get an email every morning with the above command line as the subject and a blank message area. I'm wondering if there's a way to set it up so I only get the email if there's an error or other problem. It seems silly to get a blank email every day.

Thank you for your speedy reply.

I am trying to run a script that will update my MT_Blacklist automatically, Blacklist Updater. I believe I have the files configured and uploaded to the right place. Now I need to set up a cron job. The author of the script gives >0 */2 * * * /path/to/php /path/to/updateblacklist.php as an example, which he says will update every two hours. (I think every 12 hours would be plenty often enough for me.) I don't know what the path to PHP is. I'm pretty sure the path to updateblacklist.php would be mydomainname.com/blacklistupdater/updateblacklist.php . If this is incorrect, please let me know. If I understand how to write the command line, I think I can configure the rest of the cron job, based on other threads I have read here. Thanks for the help!

Elise of Learning Movable Type conducted a survey of MT users, asking them to rate their webhost on various criteria. TCH was one of the most highly rated. For all the details, see The Results Are In!.

I can't see the thread that Rob is referring to in the previous post. In the TCH Help Site, it says I am trying to do this with Opera 7's email client, but I keep getting an error message. This is how I have the account set up: mail address: myname@mywebsite.com username: myname@mywebsite.com/spam password: same as for myname@website.com authentication: auto What should I be doing differently? This is the error I get: -ERR Cannot find a valid mail... Thanks for your help