Drupal Installation: 500 Internal Server Errors

During the installation of Drupal, it’s quite common to hit “500 Internal Server Error”s.

Looking at your sites error logs generally will reveal a couple errors:

.htaccess: order not allowed here

and/or

.htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here

What you’re hitting here are collisions between your apache configuration and the directives that are in the Drupal .htaccess file.  The default site folder options for Apache are fairly restrictive.  These are the settings in the main httpd.conf, and are the default options for every site running on your server.

I wouldn’t recommend changing this setting at the global level.  It is best to make the changes in the VirtualHost configuration for the site, so only that site is affected.

The simplest method would be these settings:

<Directory “/path/to/your/webroot”>
AllowOverride All
Options FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

AllowOverride

AllowOverride tells Apache which settings a .htaccess file is allowed to change.

Druapl AllowOverride Settings:

All – This basically says, let the .htaccess file change anything.  And it’s the easiest way to get up and going.

Limit – Allows Drupal to change the Order Allow/Deny settings.

Indexes – Allows Drupal to change the “Options” to -Indexes

Options

Options sets the initial Apache options, which can then be modified by any AllowOverride settings. Ideally you can set this to what Druapl wants to begin with, then remove the other lines that are making the changes from the .htaccess file.

Drupal Options Settings:

These are the settings Drupal is actually trying to get too.

Options -Indexes

Options +FollowSymLinks

Other Related Errors

FileInfo allows the changes for ErrorDocument. Not having this option causes the error:  .htaccess: ErrorDocument not allowed here.

DirectoryIndex allows Drupal to set DirectoryIndex, the default file handler.  Not having this option causes the error: .htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here.

Not quite sure what config setting is causing this error, but it happens when the .htaccess tries to change PHP settings, which causes the error:  .htaccess: php_value not allowed here.

Posting to Your Blog from Google Docs

So, it turns out you can use Google Docs to write and post to your blog.  And it’s pretty dang easy!  Now, I did run into some limitations (as I mention below) but this is a great way to publish Google Docs information to your blog.

To test it, this post was done completely from Google Docs.

How to Set It Up

Just fire up a Google Doc and type some stuff up.

When you’re ready to publish, go to the “Share” button in the upper right area of the screen and select “Publish as web page…”.

The screen that pops up lets you share your document with other Google Docs users (the upper half) and also lets you publish to a blog (the lower half).

The settings:

If you’re using Wordpress, the API for Blogger.com and Movable Type API both work fine.  Although Google says the Movable Type API will work better, so use that.

Then just enter the login information for your blog and the path to your xmlrpc.php file.  That is usually just  http://www.myblog.com/xmlrpc.php

Google will remember the settings, so the next document you create can easily be published to your blog too.  No clue how well this would work if you were trying to manage multiple blogs with Google Docs.

Things That Worked Well:

Updating: Once you have published your post, if you want to push out the latest changes from the Doc to your blog, you have to go back and click “Republish Post” on the “Publish this Document” screen.  The process worked smooth.

Formatting:  Different formatting like bold, italics, underline, colors, links, tables and images all work.  (How images work is explained more below.)

Glitches and Weird Stuff:

So I ran into a couple things while playing with this:

Images: The Google Docs image you see at the top of this post was inserted into the my Google Doc.  Publishing the post just created a link to that image on Google Docs.  So the image isn’t actually hosted on my blog.  So what happens after you delete your doc?  I tested it, the image link was still good.  Wonder if it will always work…

Categorizing Posts: An interesting note about categories.  I guess Google Docs can automatically add your post to a category too.  It does that by using “Tags” (folders?).  I couldn’t find where to tag the document and using the same folder as a category name didn’t do anything.  So my post ended up as “Uncategorized”.  Boo.

Titles: My post didn’t get a title.  Which would seem to be a major drawback.

Updating:  I wish you could make it auto update your blog when you saved the document.

Extra Formating Code: I checked the code that Google Docs added to this post. No where near as bad as what Word would do, but it had a

around each line. The post initially displayed just fine on my blog. But after going in to add a title and a category, the process of saving the post messed up that formatting. Wordpress is notorious for not liking divs. So I had to go in and clean them all out to make everything display correctly again.

Conclusion:

So, kinda a cool feature.  If you’re way into Google Docs it might be a nice way to do occasional posts or a quick way to push a document to a blog.   But there are just to many things that don’t quite work right and pretty much kill the idea of managing your blog from Google Docs.

jQuery Error: $ is not a function

This is a fun little jQuery error you’ll hit sometimes when you are trying to integrate jQuery into an already established system like Wordpress or Drupal, that is already using a Javascript library like prototype.  The problem is that you are hitting conflicts between the two libraries.  And most likely they are fighting over the $ .

Luckily, jQuery is prepared to handle this!  Good’ol jQuery.

jQuery has a “noConflict” mode, that will let all the jQuery content to run without using the $.  You just state that you are running in noConflict mode in your first line, then instead of using $(function(){…}, you replace the $ with jQuery, so it looks like this: jQuery(function(){….

Here’s a full example.

<script>

jQuery.noConflict(); // Tell jQuery you are going with noConflict mode.

jQuery(function(){ // Replace the $ with jQuery
jQuery(‘div’).doStuff();
});

</script>

This will allow the other library to use the $ without conflict.

The Wordpress White Screen of Death!

So there you are, happily updating your blog theme and BAM!

The Wordpress whitescreen of death!

The Wordpress white screen indicates that there is a problem with your current theme.  Unfortunately at this point, you can’t go change the theme to unbreak it, since the theme selector is just going to spit out PHP errors.  See the problem is, the database still has entries pointed to the “current” theme, which is either bugged, incomplete or gone.

Here are the symptoms:

• All Wordpress pages, posts, tags etc. bring up a blank white screen.
• There is no code or html output.
• The Wordpress Admin area still works. (which is a good thing).
• The Wordpress theme selector (Appearance -> Themes) page won’t load and spits out PHP errors.

What to look for:

Check to make sure your theme files are still in place.  Deleting the current themes directory, renaming the theme directory or moving the current themes directory to a new location will all cause this error.

If files were moved or deleted, the best thing to do is to just put things back where they were, switch to another theme, then do your changes or removal of the old theme.

If that’s not possible, you can go manually change the current active theme in the database.  The current template data is stored in the ‘options’ table, option_name “template”.  Just change it to the folder name of another theme.  It’s not pretty, but it works and will get you back up and running.

Official Wedding Announcement

Well it’s official, I be getting married!  Wohoo!

Here’s the “official” announcement. (more…)

Loooooooong Break

Wow, I have not posted in quite a while. I’ve been spending a LOT of time working on my own personal side projects. Building sites and working on promoting them. Fun stuff!

Now that I have a little group of growing sites, it’s been interesting to see the results.

(more…)

Strange Blizzard Splash Screen Image

So Blizzard Entertainment has some new “super amazing something”(tm) that they are going to announce.  So in true Blizzard style they are keeping everyone in suspense, with a splash screen that has been slowly showing “something” locked behind a sheet of ice.

Today you can see a pair of glowing eyes. (more…)

How Minority Rules

I now know why Democracy fails.  I learned this at work. Bare with me, this is a stupid example, but so fitting.

There are 9 of us in our office.  7 of us would prefer to have the lights off.  2 people want them on and blindingly bright.  So in true democratic fashion, the lights stay on all day as the majority are forced to capitulate to the loudly voiced demands of the minority.

Apparently in a Democracy all you have to do is yell and complain louder than anyone else and you get your way.  And that is how minority rules.

My PPC Crash Course

Today was like PPC overload.

Our company had a PPC training today, which interestingly, all the SEO guys attended  (I think we are all secretly jealous cause they get instant traffic).  It was really really good.  I picked up a lot of things I didn’t know about PPC.   I have been running PPC ads on a personal project for a while now, but today showed me that I really didn’t know what I was doing. (more…)

Code Snippets Integrated into Google Universal Search

I just saw this as I was looking up a function.  Nice little code example integrated right into the search results.  Pretty fancy.

I like that.   Now I need to get my code to show up like that.