New Site, New Blog

Sometimes, we just need a fresh start. Managing a Wordpress multsite with several blogs while juggling music teaching, freelancing gigs, and trying to get Maestro's Music Tricks off the ground simply wasn't working. 

My webmaster hat and writer's cap have collected quite a bit of dust over these past few months. A bit of website decluttering and reorganizing was well overdue.

When I undertook the project of revamping my dojo's website, my dojo mate in Saskatoon and I settled on using Squarespace. We found the process of building a new site that could be managed by members from our different training locations a relatively smooth process. Web maintenance has been a snap because Squarespace manages all the plugin and framework updates. I can only assume that they are dealing with brute force attacks because we haven't had any issues with our club site.

It's been working so well, that I decided to take the plunge and migrate my site to Squarespace. So, here we are.

The other big decision I made was to consolidate all of my blogs. All six of them. The separation by topic to do different branding only makes sense if one has time to put into branding them individually, which I don't. As for the "new" blog name, as much as I loved the names for all my blogs, The Musical Muse is the only one that could cover all the topics I write about.

It will take some time to tidy up the blog posts to make them fit their new home. It will also take some time to get the Maestro's Music Tricks e-store built. so please be patient. In the meantime, if you would like more information on my gamer-inspired music practice aid, please drop me a line.

Photo credit: Philip Wilson

Fixing My Case of WordPress Database Bloat

As some of you know, I've run into a few issues with my website this year. Let's just say that I've seen that "Internal Server Error" message more times in the past two months than I ever want to see.

Last week, everything went down - again. The main website, as well as aspects of all seven blogs. I contacted my webhost, Tera-Byte Dot. Com, and they informed me that I had over 220 database tables and over 7000 files. This slows things down to a grinding halt. The support team advised me to start going through the WordPress Support documentation, but to also be prepared to delete everything and start from scratch.

Words no blogger or website owner wants to hear.

I whined to my brother and colleague before taking the next step. That's when he asked, "Have you read any of the documentation on "database bloat"?"

Database what?

A quick Google search revealed 108,000 hits for "WordPress Database Bloat". Strangely, I was relieved to hear that my websites had a common affliction. At least, I had my starting point and I did not have to blow all my sites to smithereens and start from scratch. I was off to find helpful tutorials.

First, I followed Kimberly Castleberry's instructions in her article Is Your WordPress Blog More Than 2 Years Old? Fixing Database Bloat Issues!This required me to be a brave trooper and log into MySQL and pHpAdmin. With 220+ tables, I was glad that Ms. Castleberry spelled out what I needed to delete.

Once I completed that, I was able to log into my WordPress network admin dashboard. You can imagine how relieved I was to be able to do this.

Next, it was time to prevent this mess from happening again. I found Narga's article Prevent Hidden Causes by Clean up WordPress Database Bloat Issues. I decided to purchase and install GDragoN's WordPress plugin Smart Cleanup Tools as it is compatible for WordPress Multi-site installations.

Perhaps if I only had one website to maintain, I would have taken the most secure route of doing my website database maintenance in MySQL and pHpAdmin. However, you have to keep in mind your skills and the time you have available to deal with such things. Using Smart Cleanup Tools on all my WP sites saves me time and headaches.

I already mentioned that it is WP-MU compatible. The other thing I like about it, is that Smart Cleanup Tools allows you to schedule database clean-up at regular intervals at the click of a button.

The final thing that I did to help manage my database size is limit revisions of posts. One of the reasons that I had over 7,000 files is that WordPress dutifully saved everything! Every spam comment, every comment, every auto-save draft and every revision.

I used this Revision Control plug-in which is specifically for multi-site installations. If you only operate a single site, then use this one.

Fellow entrepreneurs, please note that you will only battle database bloat if you have a self-hosted WordPress site. If your website or blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, then WP takes care of all this for you.

However, most WP users who are uses WordPress for business will have a self-hosted website or blog through WordPress.org . More control, many cool design templates to choose from and the clincher for me: the ability to control operate all my blogs and my main site in a single network.

Those in the same Wordpress.org boat as me will have to tackle database bloat sooner rather than later. They will also have to clean up their databases on a regular basis.

So far, everything has been working smoothly. Page load times have sped up incredibly, so it seems that my website and blogs have been cured of database bloat. Now, I can put my IT hat down for a while and put the teacher/consultant hat back on, thanks to WordPress Support forums, Narga, Kimberley Castleberry and GDragoN.

Playing a Game of Patience with WordPress Multisite

Last week, I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress framework to version 3.6. I dutifully disabled my plug-ins, backed up my main site and all seven blogs and then clicked on the "Upgrade Now" link. That's when ALL sites broke. For a while, I couldn't even get in to the administrative panel. All I got was a 500 internal server error message. The support team at Tera-Byte (my webhost provider) finagled it so I could get back in. They also informed me that my WordPress theme was broken. Great.

I thought I had kept up with updating all my WP themes. I thought it would be as simple as all the previous WP framework upgrades. I thought that I was doing all right with managing all my sites on WordPress Multisite.

How wrong I was.

My first instinct was to drop everything that I was doing to rectify this - pull an all-nighter or two if need be. Rewind to a few years ago, and I would have.

However, one look at the calendar that fateful day (September 5), told me that I only had three days remaining to prepare for the teaching year. Writing, designing and printing handouts, shopping, planning and cleaning took precedence.

I had to put ALL sites into Maintenance Mode for one week. In a world where articles are shared, reviews are searched and tweets are sent by the second, every minute that you're offline is costly. Google kept sending me messages to say that the Googlebots couldn't access my site. Page rank probably dropped a bit. Unless you had my affiliate links bookmarked, you couldn't shop for sheet music or geeky cool items.

Maintenance Mode was necessary though. I needed the time to research and troubleshoot. Believe me, I needed that time. I couldn't dedicate the time to repairing my websites until I was done teaching for the night.  However, because of all the research and digging I had to do - on an already fatigued brain - I could only do so much each night.

I had to exercise patience. I had to continually remind myself that so long as the social networks were all working, Musespeak™ was still busy online through my YouTube, Soundcloud, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google+ and FB business Pages.

There were some design issues I wanted to improve upon on the main site. That meant playing around with those hex colour codes. Then, I had to research a calendar plugin use. That's been on my To Do List for months.

That went fairly well. Then, WordPress told me that it was time to upgrade to version 3.6.1. That went smoothly, until I realized that my media files on all blogs contained broken links after the upgrade. It wasn't until last last night (or early this morning), that I found the solution (if in doubt, replace the .htaccess file).

I also wanted to explore other premium WordPress themes and plug-ins that would perhaps be more compatible with WP MU. All of that takes time. As a result, I was lurking on ThemeForest and WordPress.org's Support Forums quite a bit.

In the end, I went back to my original themes - after upgrading the primary one - Pendulum. I will get around to tweaking each of my sites in turn. However, the important task is done: everything is functional. Everything is searchable. I can leave things be for now and focus on what I should be doing now: teaching, writing and practicing my music instruments.

Trying to Tame the Paper Monster

Summer is speeding to a close. I am quite happy to say that my summer decluttering project is nearly finished as well. I've decided to try using baskets to manage my papers for the week:

I've tried Bring Forward Files however, "out of sight, out of mind" happens all too easily. I've also tried weekly hanging folders. I broke a set of hanging folders because I stuffed it too much.

That brings us to the baskets. They're not that big, so I need to be vigilant to prevent spillage. They do hold more than a file folder, so that's good.

Let me translate and explain the labeling (they're in Japanese):

1. きょう ("Kyou"): Today

2. あした ("Ashita"): Tomorrow

3. こんしゅう ("Konshuu"): This Week

4. しはらって ("Shiharatte"): Pay

5. よんで ("Yonde"): Read

I've tried enough systems to know that my active trays need to be as lean as possible. Keeping it simple is really the only thing I remember out of my copy of Donna Smallin's book,  The One Minute Organizer.

Three is a  good number The remaining two trays contain items that need to be dealt with within the month.

Fingers crossed that this paper management system works!

Lesson Planning - A Work in Progress

The big decluttering project continues. It's taken years to amass all this paper and stuff so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it will take a while to clean up my mess. It seems though, that no sooner do I get my office tidied up that it becomes a bigger mess as soon as I tackle a new section in my office. Case in point:

Amidst the chaos however, plans are beginning to emerge. As I file handouts and documents from the previous teaching year, ideas for new handouts and teaching strategies are percolating in my mind.

However, I don't want to break the flow of my clean up (I refuse to start another teaching year with a messy office); so, I have three medium-sized coloured sheets, labelled: "Lesson Strategies/Planning", "Handouts to Make" and "To Do" on top of one of the binders in the lower LH corner.My tin of Crayola® markers are also close by.

So far, I've jotted down things like, "How to make technique more fun," "Strategies for helping the Keyboard Geography/Hand-Eye Coordination Challenged Students" and a long list of optional activities.

For the time being, I just grab the appropriate sheet and jot down a phrase. Once I get that tower beside my desk emptied out, then I can hunker down and transform the ideas into something tangible. I imagine that by the time I reach that point, I'll have more than three sheets of ideas. At least, it will be easier to focus as by then, I'll have a less cluttered workspace.