Year: 2012

Solution to WordPress with WP Super Cache blank pages problem

This took me a while to figure out, so I’ll post it here in case someone else ever gets into this problem.  After enabling WP Super Cache for a project at work, we’ve started seeing really weird and really random white page issues.  WordPress would show a blank page and then a few minutes later it would start working again.  But then it would disappear and so on and so forth.

Tracking the issue down, I’ve tweaked the WP Super Cache configuration quite a bit, but that didn’t help.  And I was sure that it was related to WP Super Cache, since periods of appearing and disappearing were consistent with cache timeout settings.  Browsing through WordPress support forums (threads one, two, and three) game an idea that it wasn’t just WP Super Cache on its own, but a combination of WP Super Cache plugin with something else on the system.

After a lengthy troubleshooting process, I think I nailed it.  APC – an alternative PHP cache module – wasn’t friendly with WP Super Cache.  So, as a short-term solution to the problem, I’ve disabled the APC and now everything seems to work well.  I’m a bit busy now to troubleshoot the problem further, but if you have any idea of why that could be happening, please share.

hack {cyprus} *12 presentations

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I was going to see the presentations of project on the first Cyprus hackathon.  And I went.  And it was awesome!

It was a bit tricky to find and I nearly missed it, as I didn’t know all the buildings that belong to Cyprus University of Technology.  Luckily, I spotted a bunch of people in black t-shirts outside of the building.  And there are only three groups of people that wear black t-shirts: geeks, hard rock fans, and policemen.  I approached carefully, and once I knew these weren’t the police, I knew I would blend in and have a good time.

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Avoid ESC in Vim

OK, this is one of those times when I’ve been humbled again.  I’ve been using Vim for over a decade now, and once in a while it occurred to me that using ESC to exit to normal mode is NOT the most efficient thing ever.  Maybe my little finger is too little, or maybe my keyboards are too large.  But reaching ESC with while in the middle of crazy typing session broke my concentration a few times.  But somehow I just thought that it is one of those most natural Vim things that I had to get used to.  Today, I came across something genius that told me that I don’t have to.  If you have the same problem, edit your .vimrc file and add the following lines:

" exit to normal mode with 'jj'
inoremap jj <ESC>

Once you load your new configuration, typing ‘jj‘ in insert mode will be equivalent to press ESC key.  Brilliant!