October 30th, 2006 | admin
October 29th, 2006 | admin
October 28th, 2006 | admin
October 26th, 2006 | admin
October 25th, 2006 | admin
The site’s been showing a 500 error occasionally lately, and a lot today. Seems to be a combination of a couple of rogue plug-in scripts and a traffic surge for the Shuttle pics that took my new host by surprise (I’m pretty sure I got hit by Digg today). Things should run smoother now. If you still get 500 errors, drop me a note.
October 23rd, 2006 | admin
October 21st, 2006 | admin
October 20th, 2006 | admin
October 19th, 2006 | admin
October 18th, 2006 | admin
October 17th, 2006 | admin
October 14th, 2006 | admin
September 30th, 2006 | admin
If all has gone to plan, then, courtesy of the wonderful Ariana and new website host Dreamhost, warrenellis.com is back.
Touch wood.
September 18th, 2006 | Work, admin
For those who might be just joining me:
My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics and graphic novels, among other things. I’ve done quite a lot of them. I have several comics works floating around on the internet for free:
TRANSMETROPOLITAN: “Another Cold Morning.” | FELL: the first story. | JOHN CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER: “Shoot.” | SUPERIDOL. And a very early one: LAZARUS CHURCHYARD: “Lucy’s Drowning.”
I’m guest of honour at the Helsinki Comics Festival September 23-24.
These are the places you can find me on the internet. There’s a fair few of them, too:
Bad Signal is my email journal. It’s announcement-only style, which means you only get email from me, not the 10000 readers and counting who are on the list. I use it for thinking out loud. Sometimes you won’t hear from me for a week. Sometimes you’ll hear from me five times a day. Often I will be drunk. Sometimes I will be naked. People on Bad Signal tend to cry a lot.
http://www.myspace.com/warrenellis = I add anyone, me. I also abuse the bulletin system terribly. I’m tempted to start a religion there, but Rupert Murdoch would come for me. And nobody needs that. In any way.
http://www.flickr.com/people/warrenellis/ = where I store my photos. My friends-and-contacts list there is usually full of interesting stuff, as I know many mentally ill lovely people.
I run an online community. THE ENGINE is devoted to comics (and music and other stuff).
http://www.bloglines.com/public/warrenellis = my daily reading list.
I don’t use IM. I can most easily be found on warrene @ aol.com.
– W
September 7th, 2006 | admin
So, as I said the other day, my friend Ariana hit the website with a big shitty stick until the moblogging system started working. To a code-illiterate like me, this was not a small thing. So I got her to write down how she did it. Ariana’s explanation follows:
*Â Â *Â Â *Â Â *Â Â *
Note: This is only one way to enable mobile blogging with WordPress. There are other plugins out there that may work just as well, or better, depending on your set up, version, and preferences. This is just the way I set things up for Warren when nothing else seemed to be working.
What you’ll need:
1. A current build of WordPress.
2. A phone capable of sending email, photos, etc.
3. An email account that you will use exclusively for posting.
4. Posties
5. WP-Cron
What to do:
1. Download and unzip Posties, then upload the postie folder (using FTP or your cpanel) to wherever you have WordPress. All the files for Posties need to be in their own folder, so your directory layout should look like this:
wordpress>wp-content>plugins>postie>all the posties files
2. Next, download WP-Cron, unzip the folder, and upload it to the plugins directory as well. The directory layout for wp-cron should be:
wordpress>wp-content>plugins>wp-cron
3. While you’re in the admin panel or FTP application, back out to your MAIN wordpress directory (the one where the folders “wp-admin†and “wp-content†are). You’ll need to create two new directories:
wp-filez
wp-photos
These two directories need to be set to CHMOD 766. If you’re doing this from an FTP client, you’ll create two new folders, name them wp-filez and wp-photos, and then right-click to select properties, permissions, or chmod (depending on your program it could be any of those three). By default, folders are set to 0, so just change that number to 766. If you’re working through a web-based control panel, there should be a similar option either next to the folder icon, or at the top or bottom of the screen. If you’re doing this all via telnet or SSH, you should damned well know how to chmod files. If you don’t, close your terminal before you break something, and get an FTP client.
4. You can close FTP, or leave the cpanel now. Log into your WordPress account as Admin, and activate the following new plugins:
Cronless Postie
Postie
WP-Cron
Ignore all of the other WP-Cron plugins (Dashboard, Reminder, etc.) for now. You’re more than welcome to go back and look at them later, but they aren’t necessary for posting-by-phone. There’s relatively good documentation over at the WP-Cron page about all of the plugins, but the truth is that we’re just using WP-Cron because that’s what the Posties plugin needs.
5. If everything activated with no errors, you’re ready to configure Postie. From the WordPress Dashboard, choose Options>Configure Postie. You will need to set the following:
6. Now, first test. Send an email from one of the “Authorized Addresses†to the account you specified in “Mailserver Settings.†Wait a minute, then click the Run Postie button at the top of the Postie Options screen. If you did everything correctly, a new entry should appear on WordPress. If not, back up and see if you missed any steps.
7. Cronless Postie + WP-Cron. Once you’ve got Posties working, you need to set up WordPress to automatically check for new emails. Otherwise, the only way you’ll be able to post is by logging in and clicking that little button. WP-Cron basically uses RSS feeds, webcrawlers, and other automated systems to trigger automated tasks. If your blog has a LiveJournal feed, for instance, WP-Cron will automatically run a list of commands every time it is accessed by the LJFeed aggregator. Cronless Postie is one of the commands that WP-Cron can run. Both need to be enabled for Postie to auto-update, and tiny bit of code needs to be inserted into your wp-rss.php file:
do_action(’check_postie’);
Cut and paste the above line of code into wp-rss.php. It goes by itself, on the line below the first } and above the word header.
8. Cronless Postie+WP-Cron may not work immediately. Remember, this is a workaround is based on RSS feeds and webcrawlers. If the only RSS feed currently subscribed to your journal is LiveJournal, you’ll have about an hour delay between fetch times,which means you could be waiting for up to an hour before an email post goes live. If that does not suit your needs, then you’ll need to subscribe to something that updates a little more often (try bloglines, or gmail rss). There are also known issues with the Cronless Postie app — in other words, if you just can’t get it to work, it’s probably not your fault. If your directory is anything other than normal (if you’ve got wordpress in a different folder than your main page) or if you have some arcane plugins that don’t want to play nice with WP-Cron, there’s not a whole lot you can do except Step 9 below.
9. Alternately, you can set up a webmonitoring service (like Easy Monitor) to check:
http://yourserver.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php.
Unfortunately, free Web Monitoring services are notorious for down times and error messages, so if you can get wp-cron working, it’s far more dependable. If your hosting provider comes with a Web Monitoring service, this is definately your best bet, because if their servers are down, there’s a good chance your site will be, too.
10. And that’s it. If you got it working, congratulations! Go get yourself a drink. You’ve earned it. If not, go get yourself a drink, anyway. You’ probably need it.
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NOTES: if you’re going to use Gmail as your secret-address mailserver, remember to select POP3-SSL from the dropdown.Â
ISSUES: Posting-to-blog via Flickr is currently not working. I have not yet discovered whether the problem lies with the moblog solution or with my new phone. If it turns out to be a conflict between the above solution and Flickr — well, since this solution allows you to post photos straight to your blog off the phone too, it’s not that much of an issue, is it?
My thanks to Ariana both for making the thing work, and for taking the time to write her steps down.
[TAGS]wordpress, moblog, post+by+mail, mobile, cron, postie, cronless, wp-cron, annoying+the+fuck+out+of+you+by+phone[/TAGS]
August 27th, 2006 | admin
Is Technorati fucked again? How do you get to be the ninth most-linked blog and yet also drop 350 points in Technorati ranking in the same week? I suspect I’m not getting useful returns from Technorati (again), and so have stripped the Cosmos link from the bottom of entries. It’s professionally useful to know who’s linking to me, but I think it’s time to give up on the idea of tracking such by blog entry.
So if you were looking for the Cosmos link on the end of entries — that’s why it’s not there anymore.
(And, no, I’m still not done with site design fiddling.)
August 13th, 2006 | admin
My friend Ariana upgraded the WordPress software this site runs on from 1.5 to 2.0.4 for me last night. And the only weirdnesses we have encountered are that new comments aren’t being counted on the front page, and that, no matter what I do, posting using the bookmarklet (which is far less friendly than it used to be anyway) seems to guarantee that the posts default to comments-off, no matter what I do on the dashboard.
The former is a known bug. The latter is just fucking strange and I don’t have time for it. So, if anyone wants to talk about the posts here, I’m pushing all discussion to a WARRENELLISCOM section on THE ENGINE for now.
WarrenEllis.com runs on a Wordpress engine. If you've read the whole page you may want to return to the top, subscribe via RSS, or find Warren on Twitter @warrenellis.