Category: Geek Stuff

It’s no secret that I love Graphite. My co-workers think it’s a bit ridiculous how much data I feed into our graphite server. I may be a bit excessive, but I have a monitor in my office which allows me to see at a glance every little detail about our network in real time – server health, pageviews, Google Pagespeed Insight scores, etc. I can’t even describe how wonderful a tool it is.

I wanted an easy way to display graphite graphs on the WordPress dashboard. So I rolled out a plugin over the weekend. I give you WordPress Graphite Graphs – I admit I [somewhat] got the idea from WPVIP’s “page generation time” graph in the VIP dashboard, but I’m sure they won’t mind. This plugin allows me (or you) to rapidly deploy monitoring graphs across many different sites without a lot of hassle and NO custom code for each site. Just plug in the URL of your graphite server, the metrics you want to display, and viola – Graphy delight! While I was at it, I went ahead and added support for graphs on the front-end in the sidebar that can be hidden from non-users if needed. Why not, right?

Shoot me a tweet if you’re interested in additional features or get in on the action and fork it on github.

This is a quick script which reads a standard RSS feed and then grabs the response header for each feed item and makes a log file of 404 errors. Useful in debugging sticky situations.

<?php 

$link_queue = array(); 
$exception_queue = array(); 

$timestamp = date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s' ); 
$rss = simplexml_load_file( $argv[1] ); 

foreach ( $rss-&gt;channel-&gt;item as $item )
  array_push( $link_queue, $item-&gt;link );

foreach ( $link_queue as $url ) {
  $handle = curl_init( $url );
  curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE );
  $response = curl_exec( $handle );
  $response_code = curl_getinfo( $handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE );

  if ( $response_code !== 200 )
    array_push( $exception_queue, &quot;{$url} returned status code {$response_code}&quot; );

  curl_close( $handle );
}

if ( count( $exception_queue ) ) {
  foreach ( $exception_queue as $e )
    echo $timestamp . ' &gt; ' . $e . &quot;n&quot;;
} else {
  echo $timestamp . &quot; &gt; All URLs returned status code 200n&quot;;
}

die();

// omit

Throw it in cron like this:
*/30 * * * * php /path/to/script.php http://somesite.com/feed/ >> /path/to/log 2>&1

Or run it on the command line like this:
php /path/to/the/script.php http://somesite.com/feed/

Sometimes you just need to get rid of all that trackback data from your WordPress database. Here’s how to do it manually from your MySQL command line:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type='trackback';
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type='pingback';

Great, but now your comments counts are all out of whack, since that integer is stored in the wp_posts table. Here’s how to check that:

SELECT wpp.id, wpp.post_title, wpp.comment_count, wpc.cnt
FROM wp_posts wpp
LEFT JOIN (
	SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments
	WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc
	ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id
	WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')
	AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL)
);

And here’s how to fix it (make a backup of your database first, just in case):

UPDATE wp_posts wpp
LEFT JOIN (
	SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments
	WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc
	ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id
	SET wpp.comment_count=wpc.cnt
	WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')
	AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL)
);

Cheers!