Daily Cup of Tech

I have had a number of people ask me which plugins I unplugged during my recent Digg Effect. I was reluctant to name names because each and every one of these plugins that I was using was there for a reason. That reason was to provide me with information to better run the blog and provide services.

What I do not want this post to become is a bashing session. Every single one of these plugins that I will be mentioning are excellent additions to any WordPress blog and I am not slamming them nor the developers. All I am saying is that if you find yourself in th middle of a Digg Effect, you might try deactivating these plugins until you get over the hump. Do not not use them because of this post. Rather, use them wisely.

All that being said, these are the plugins that I disabled in no particular order:

• Adhesive
• AdSense Earnings Reports
• bLaugh
• bsuite
• Footnotes
• Live
• WP-UserOnline

The three that seemed to help the most were bsuite, Live, and WP-UserOnline, even though bsuite was the hardest for me to deactivate (I love the stats and information it provides me).

I disabled bsuite because it wrote a lot to the database each time a hit came in. And what can you expect when it gathers so much information. I was very sad to disable it.

Live provided a real time look at what was happening on my blog at the very moment. It essentially kept polling the system every ten seconds and reporting the changes. Very intensive.

Another processor intensive plugin was WP-UserOnline. It was awesome to be able to see how many people were on my blog at any given time. But was that information worth the extra strain on the server? I decided not and out it went.

Now, one plugin you definitely want to have is WP-Cache. It keeps html version of your php files and uses them instead of reprocessing them and sending them to the database. This alone could save you.

If you are having trouble with your website displaying blank pages that come back when you refresh, follow these instructions:

1. Open /wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php file* in your favourite text editor, where is the domain that you’re having troubles with EG: dreamhost.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php
2. Alternatively if that file is not in that location for some reason you can issue this command to find it from the directory: find . -name wp-cache-phase2.php
3. Find out wp_cache_ob_end function
4. then inside that function find the line with: ob_end_clean(); (it should be line 219 or about)
5. and finally replace that line with: ob_end_flush();

Once I got that straightened away, my problems disappeared.

So, if you are running WordPress and find you are getting grief from your web host, you may want to disable some of these and see if it resolves the problems.

Now, I am certain that there are some other WordPress plugins out there that have caused you pain in the past. Feel free to share them with the rest of us in the comments.

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