One computer on Network Slow Internet Connection: Simple Fixes

When most of the computers on a network are running fine, but one computer on network has a very slow connection, it can be a little crazy-making trying to troubleshoot.

If you’re me, you go more than a little crazy because you know very little about networking. All I knew was that something was very wrong with my speeds.

You can verify that it’s a problem with one specific PC by running a speed test on the sluggish computer and also on another that appears to be functioning properly. (If you don’t have access to test another computer, try using a phone connected to the same wireless network to compare.)

Don’t ask me to explain these fixes or why they can work, because that’s above my pay grade. I can tell you that these are safe to try and may help.

Method One: Flushing DNS

  • press windows logo key
  • type “cmd” to find command prompt
  • select “run as administrator” and allow the program permission to make changes

Then type the following commands into the command prompt box, in this order:

  1. ipconfig /flushdns
  2. ipconfig /registerdns
  3. ipconfig /release
  4. ipconfig /renew
  5. netsh winsock reset

You’ll want to restart your computer after running these commands, and then return to the speed test. You may also want to retry the speed test in a few minutes to make sure the fix “sticks.”

Method Two: Fix Wireless Connection

Last time this was an issue, I had something fishy going on with my wireless connection. So check your wireless.

But take note: while the network indicator I first looked at (accessed from the computer’s Taskbar) said my wireless was fine, going into the control panel to check gave different results: it said the wireless was disconnected.

You can open the right location this way:

Get to the Run dialog (got by pressing Win + R keys) and click OK to open the interface. Type in this and return: input ncpa.cpl 

This is what you’ll see…

Make sure you’re checking your wireless connection in the control panel, under Network and Internet/Network Connections.

After toggling the connection on and off a couple of times, it now was saying I was, indeed connected and I got my high speeds back.

Note: I also noticed while the wireless network was disconnected, DNS for certain websites wasn’t working, meaning I could go to some websites but not others. This was super obvious since one of the sites that wasn’t working for me was the speed testing site.

I will not even remotely hint that I understand wireless networking, why Windows shows the wireless connection as just fine in one place but not in another, or how this interacts with DNS.

Just sharing what worked for me, since this is a crazy annoying problem and I wanted to have a record of what I did in case it happens again and maybe help somebody else dealing with the same.

Good luck to you!

Mass Deleting Broken Shortcodes in WordPress

First of all, get yourself the (old-but-still-works) Search Regex plugin. Don’t edit these posts by hand or you’ll want to slit your wrists within minutes. Instead, you’re going to use Regular expressions and man, does this make your life easier! Don’t worry if you’re not a reg-ex whiz. I’m not either! But I figured it out so some examples.

Shortcodes can be deleted in two swipes if you have content wrapped in them you want to keep. Let’s say you had the misfortune to be tasked with cleaning up a site that used to run Avada as it’s theme so you have a billion useless shortcodes to clean up. So you have a bunch of this:

[fusion_whatver attribute="blah,blah,kill-me-now"]This is content I still need to keep, damnit![/fusion_whatever]

Not good. But you can resolve it in literally a couple minutes.

First of all, take a backup of your database first. DUH! You can break things and I’m not going to help you try to fix them. Then get busy with your plugin.

Opening Shortcode Search

@\[fusion.*?\]@

Your search will look something like this, with your actual shortcode text of course. This is saying, give me all the shortcode starting with the word “fusion” until the shortcode closing bracket.

The @ symbol is the delimiter, starting and ending the search expression. The forward slash is an escape character, specifying that left bracket is part of what you’re looking for in the text, not search instructions.

The dot and asterisk say to grab stuff after the beginning of the shortcode text specified, and the question mark basically says not to grab too much. This will pick up all the shortcodes start with “[fusion” up to right bracket. So this is what it would match from the example above.

[fusion_whatver attribute="blah,blah,kill-me-now"]

The content you want to keep won’t be touched. Leave the replacement field blank and pull the trigger. Then move to the next part.

Ending Shortcode RegEx Search

@\[\/fusion.*?\]@

This is looking for closing fusion shortcodes. The extra forward slash is to escape the backslash so again, specifying that is part of the actual search text and not instructions. It will remove any closing shortcode tags like the “fusion_whatever” in the example without messing up the content wrapped in the shortcodes.

And if you don’t want the content in between the shortcode tags? Use the initial statement but without the question mark and it will get it all Like this:

@\[fusion.*\]@

There is a preview function so you can check and make sure you’re actually doing what you want before you hit the button that is marked “Save. “If you know Regex you could do all sorts of weird and dangerous things with this but if you don’t, maybe this will be enough to get you going. Good luck!

Bonus Points: That penguin guy has a very helpful article on this! Thanks, Penguin dude.

Need a WordPress Admin Password Reset?

So, you are locked out of your WordPress and you need in? Maybe the password reset function won’t work for you, because you don’t have access to the email anymore or you’ve instituted some security protocol that won’t allow a reset for an admin’s passwords or whatever.

I don’t know you. I don’t know your pain.

Whatever the situation, you need in. While I do have a tutorial here on adding an admin user to WordPress through the database, there is a much quicker and easier way.

Specifically, if you have FTP access and you know the admin username–and please tell me it’s not “admin” because I might have to slap you–then you can use this emergency password reset script.

You just save the code as emergency.php, upload it to the root of your WP installation, and visit the url of the script to reset your admin password. Then, please DELETE the script. Because any hacker yahoo on the planet could be searching for this very script and do the same dang thing you just did.

The internet being what it is, where info sometimes disappears into the ethers, I’m copying the code for you here.

If you fail to delete the script when you’re done, you’re totally on you own, man. Hope that helps and happy blogging!

WordPress Multisite Using CloudFlare on Individual Blogs

Trying to set up a WordPress Multisite using CloudFlare on individual blogs? I was. I just moved a WordPress (WP) Multisite subdomain installation and wanted to take full advantage of CloudFlare CDN for each for each of the sites blogs. It’s an awesome service, and free!

Using the lazy route of enabling CloudFlare on my domains via hosting control panel, it requires the www domain name prefix to invoke it’s magic. But the file uploads in a WordPress multisite don’t automatically include this magic.

By default, media uploaded through WP uses the path http://subblog.primaryblogdomain.com – we want to change that to http://www.blogname.com to be served up by CloudFlare.

How-to Instructions for setting up WordPress Multisite Using CloudFlare

In the WP backend (as Super Admin), on the toolbar, go to My Sites/Network Admin/Sites

Edit each site that has been set up on CloudFlare, and select the “Settings” tab.

Change the “site URL” field to be your fully qualified CloudFlare domain, as in http://www.blogname.com and note the blog ID number, from URL when you’re editing each blog. It will end with “site-settings.php?id=X” and we’ll make use of it shortly.

Test an upload to see it uses the proper url. Boom, it’s set!

If you are doing this on an installation that has been moved (i.e. already has posts), you’ll also need to update the posts table in the database. I like to use PHPmyAdmin for this. Hint: Backups are your friend!

Here is the query you’re looking at, where “X” is the ID of the wordpress blog if your tables are named named as mine are; you can easily identify each blog’s ID 

UPDATE wp_X_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'subblog.primaryblogdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/', 'www.subblog.com/wp-content/uploads/');

I would suggest leaving the upload path in the SQL command so you don’t inadvertently change something you didn’t want to change. Also, be sure it’s a correct upload path for your setup!

After you’re done, you can also add the CloudFlare WordPress plugin to see to it your stats and so forth accurately reflect your visitors’ locations. You will need to configure the plugin on each site of your installation individually.

I found I also needed to re-save my permalinks in some cases. I’m not sure if it was this operation that created the need or not. I was doing a lot of work on my install at the time, but if you’re getting 404 errors with post titles, give that a try.

That’s it–configuring Wordpress Multisite Using CloudFlare is not so difficult.   Unless you have some image paths hard-coded in your themes, plugin or widget code, your WordPress should now serve all your images from Cloudflare instead of the local server. No plugins, no headaches. Just a little configuration change and some mySQL voodoo.

FYI, this information is offered AS IS, in the hopes it is of help to someone. If you break your Wordpress, I cannot fix it for you. I cannot answer WP support questions. This is what worked for me, period. Thanks for understanding.

Resolving WordPress Plugin Activation Error “Characters of Unexpected Output During Activation” & “Headers Already Sent” Php Error

 “The plugin generated 3 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin.” – WordPress Error

Not good, right? This was the error message I ran into updating a WordPress plugin that I happen to really like. Worse, it indeed generated the “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by…” error message when my caching plugin was active. While things worked without my cache plugin, my cache plugin definitely took priority over the lightweight image box plugin that was throwing the errors.

I did the obligatory searching for blank spaces at the beginning and ending of implicated php files for the “headers already sent” error to no avail. A little more research led me to a quick solution, though.

Resolving the Unexpected Output During Activation Error

It appears this happens because straight UTF has a few invisible bytes in the encoding that identifies it as UTF, known as BOM. This confuses PHP. (Like my technical talk here? Har!) But it’s easy to fix.

Grab the free Notepad ++, open the offending php file from the plugin folder–identified via your error messages–and using the “Encoding” option on the Notepad ++ menu, change the encoding from UTF-8 to Encode in UTF-8 (without BOM). Save and replace it in the plugin folder. Woot!

Hope this helps somebody!

Fonts rendering blurry in FireFox after Windows Update Solution

Agggh! I love my Firefox, but the fonts started looking awful after a recent Windows 7 and Microsoft Mouse update. I was using FF 19 and having no issue with it before.

I spent a few days trying suggestions from various support forum threads, Mozilla help, and countless website results from Google searches trying to fix it. The broken, blurry fonts made it all but unusable.

Here’s how I finally solved the problem:

  1. type about:config in the location bar. Promise to be careful.
  2. search for  gfx.content.azure.enabled and click the line to set it to false by clicking on it.
  3. Restart Firefox.
  4. Hopefully rejoice!

Yay! There are an awful lot of potential tweaks suggested for this problem, but if they aren’t working for you, maybe this one will.

Thanks to this forum post for the solution!

Widows Live Writer Error “Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server” After WordPress Update Fix

My solution for the Windows Live Writer (WLW) error:

The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the blog server was invalid:  Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server

Warning: This solution entails editing a WordPress core file and is therefore generally not recommended. If some PHP guru knows how to fix this with code in the functions.php file or something, I’m all ears!

  1. Find class-wp-xmlrpc-server.php in wp-includes folder
  2. In the code, locate the line “if ( strpos( $post_content, $file->guid ) !== false )”
  3. Directly before it add another line of code…
if($file->guid && !($file->guid == NULL))

I’m usually not big on editing core files, but I use WLW to blog daily and this error keeps cropping up. It’s highly frustrating and there are numerous fixes around the web that are both more time consuming and not necessarily effective. This is a quick, down-and-dirty fix that will get you up and running.

Solution Courtesy “Stuff I Stumbled Upon Blog“

Creating Addon Domain for Site Hosted Elsewhere in cPanel

Trying to set up a site as an addon domain before moving it from another hosting account? You may get mooned by cPanel in such cases. Here is there error you see and (more importantly) how to fix it.

When you try to set up the addon, you get this message:

There was a problem creating the addondomain. Show Details

Error from park wrapper: Using nameservers with the following IPs: xx.xxx.xxx.xxx,xx.xxx.xxx.xxx Sorry, the domain is already pointed to an IP address that does not appear to use DNS servers associated with this server. Please transfer the domain to this servers nameservers or have your administrator add one of its nameservers to /etc/ips.remotedns and make the proper A entries on that remote nameserver.

In order to eliminate this error, go into WHM. In Server Configuration, under Tweak Settings option, check this box:

Allow Creation of Parked/Addon Domains that resolve to other servers (i.e. domain transfers) [This can be a major security problem. If you must have it enabled, be sure to not allow users to park common internet domains.]

Once you’ve created the addon domain, you can untick this box again. It’s more secure to leave it unchecked, of course, but many times you’ll want to get the new site up and running before you change over DNS, huh? At least, if you’re smart, you do.
photo credit: bwright923

SPF Records for Google Apps Email

If you’re using Google Apps for email–and it’s a solid choice with lots of storage space, spam management tools and integration with other free services–after creating the appropriate DNS records to route your email, you’ll want to add an SPF Record. This ensures better email delivery and prevents vile spammers from forging their spam as having come from you!

Some domain registrars give you adequate tools to add an SPF record directly, but if not, it’s simple enough to add it directly in WHM. ((Thanks to this helpful article on Tech Talk Point.))

You’re using the “Edit Zone” command; select the zone for the domain in question, and add a new text record.

Google Apps Mail SPF

Use domain.com. (keeping period at the end intact) as the entry, and the code below for the text part of the record (keeping quotes intact). 

"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"

See? That didn’t hurt much.