Category Archives: Plugins

An error occured while updating a plug-in

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I tried to update my plug-ins and one or more of the plug-ins gave me an error that looks like this:
An error occurred while updating <plug-in name>: Could not create directory. <full-real-path-of-folder>.

Then I went the plug-in page and it says those plug-ins have been deactivated because they are not found.

Then I tried to reinstall those plug-ins, but that gave me an error.

Then I tried to upload the plug-ins using an FTP client, but I got  a “550 Access denied” error.

I logged into my Godaddy Windows shared hosting account.  When I tried to access those folders, I got another “Access denied” error.

To fix it, I went to the parent directory “wp-content/plugins” and reset its permissions.  I unchecked “inherit”, then checked “read”, “write” and “Reset all children to inherit” then clicked OK and waited for the operation to complete.  I looked in the plugins folder and found the problem folders were no longer there, but I could reinstall them successfully.

I wish I could remember where I heard how to fix this, because I would like to credit where it’s due.

On a another blog I maintain, I thought I could prevent the install error by resetting the folder permissions before updating.  Nope, didn’t work. The plugin folder did not have “inherit” checked, but did have “read” and “write” checked.  I checked “Reset all children to inherit” and click OK as before.  So I tried again, but this time click “inherit” for the “plugins” folder and checked the “Reset all children…” box, and it worked that time.

So it looks like if the “inherit” box is checked, you need to uncheck it and vice-versa.  Just as long as read and write permissions are getting set for the child folders.

The same plug-ins that gave error when updating on the first blog gave me an error on this blog.  Some plug-ins updated fine.  So I don’t know if the problem is with the server, the plug-ins, or a combination of both.

Anyone else having this problem on a Godaddy Windows server?

Hide email addresses with emObA

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The spammers are out there, and they are relentless.

You leave one unprotected email address in a post and they will find it.

emOba does a nice job of hiding your email addresses whether you have the email address embedded in a link or displayed as text.

If you are using a plugin like WP Touch to make your site mobile-device friendly, be sure to copy the CSS code from Emoba’s CSS file into the mobile theme’s file or the @s are going to appear huge.

Domain changed!

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So I changed the domain to WPressureCooker.com.

I thought I’d share how I did it to show how to do it so you don’t have to worry about folks trying to get to your site through the old domain and getting a 404/”file not found” message.

The first thing I did was some research to find the best way to do this.

Quick disclaimer: This may not be the best way for your site.  But this worked for me.  Be sure to back up your database and files before proceeding.

I followed the Yoast.com site’s advice and created a robots.txt file, but ended there because I was not moving any files and he was giving instructions for an Apache server where I was using a Windows server hosting plan.

In my Godaddy hosting account, I set the new domain (wpressurecooker.com) to point to the same folder wordpressurecooker.com is pointing to, and waited for the status to go from Pending to Setup.

Logged in my site’s admin and went to the General settings.  There I changed the Blog URL and Site URL to the new domain name.

I installed the plugin, Domain-Change by Soz which creates the 301 Redirect for you that automatically redirects folks from your old domain to the new.  So if someone comes to your site by a link that goes to a specific article, the page comes up under the new domain.  Even my shortened Pretty Links worked.

I deleted the robots.txt file from my site.

Next came the stat tracking.  I use Google Analytics.  I was hoping that the 301 redirect will take care of most of the problems, but just in case, I made a change to my Google Analytics account and the Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk settings.  There is the possibility I did this wrong, but in Google Analytics for wordpressurecooker.com I set it to track “multiple top level domains”.  I noticed the code (that you would paste in if you didn’t use the plugin) changed where _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); so in the plugin settings, I set Domain Tracking (which sets _setDomainName) to “none”.

I also have WordPressurecooker.com registered under Google’s Webmaster Tools.  That required me to verify the wpressurecooker.com domain, then for wordpressurecooker.com, I clicked “Change of address” under “Site configuration” I set the New URL for wordpressurecooker.com to wpressurecooker.com.  In the settings for wpressurecooker.com I set the sitemap URL.

It took me a lot longer to type this all out than to make the changes, so I think you will find it pretty easy.

So did I miss anything?

FeedWordPress making invalid RSS?

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As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using FeedWordpress to syndicate affiliate links.  I turned on the option to have the permalink to the affiliated articles to go straight to the affiliate link instead of the page (that may be bad for SEO, but one less click for visitors).

The problem was the RSS feed became invalid because of the affiliate link.  So I need to encode the link.  So on line 590 of feedwordpress.php, I changed

$uri = get_syndication_permalink();

to

$uri = esc_attr(get_syndication_permalink());

The esc_attr function is a built in WordPress function that converts certain characters to their HTML encoded equivalents. Such as “&” becomes “&amp;”.

Everything seems to be working fine now.