It is so difficult to find a cache plugin for WordPress that works as advertised.  Either they corrupt the cache and serve garbage after a while or they cache pages like the home page even when you tell them not to and it breaks things, like the hit counter.

     Our website may be a little slow until I get caching properly configured.

     PHP on the web server has been upgraded from 5.3.3 to 5.6.10.  I am not upgrading to version 7 at this time because of severe backward compatibility issues that break too many existing applications such as WordPress.  Also installed with 5.6.10 is an opcode cache that hopefully will improve efficiency though I didn’t see any difference in page load times before and after the upgrade.  But it will allow me to use some cache plugins that would not work with 5.3.3.

     I will be upgrading PHP on the shell servers that have older versions as time allows.  This is mostly the Centos 6 and SL 6 machines, most of the others have reasonably current versions.

     Because WP Fragment Cache requires PHP version 5.3.6 or greater, and I want to use this on our website, I am going to attempt an upgrade of PHP tomorrow evening.

     Because of the integration of PHP with so many other components, most importantly mysql and Apache, there is a non-trivial chance of something going really wrong.

     To safeguard against permanent damage, I am going to take the web server down, image it, then perform the upgrade.

     If all goes well, I’ll take it down again and make another backup with the new PHP installed.

     If all does not go well, I’ll take it down and restore from the just made image.

     Either way, there will be two down periods lasting about 20 minutes each between 10PM and midnight tomorrow evening July 10th.

I added a couple of new web applications that make it easy for you to locate someone online or check the status of the shell servers, they are Rwho and Ruptime respectively.

     We experienced a brief denial of service attack around 1:45PM today (July 9th).  It didn’t last long enough to take any action and didn’t block access to services but did increase latency for a short period.

     I’ve run into a couple of problems with the new website that I didn’t anticipate.  The fly-out menus fly right off the edge of the screen on devices with screens to small for them to fit, and the tables to compress well.  I’m working on these things.

     I had a minor counter after moving it to a WordPress page.  For some reason the time-zone PHP is initialized to inside WordPress is GMT even though I had both php.ini and WordPress itself set to America/Los Angeles (Pacific) time.

     I ended up having to add a set timezone call to the counter to make it work in the right time-zone and not turn over at 5pm (8GMT with an hour offset for Daylight Savings Time makes midnight GMT or UTC or whatever you want to call it be 5pm our time).

     And with a little tweaking, I got the social media buttons working again.

     I got the colors mostly figured out.  The one thing that isn’t working right is the parent doesn’t stay highlighted on the main menu when a child is hovered over.

     Somehow I managed to delete part of the application form so it does not post at present. I am working on a fix for this.

     I’m having difficulty getting the CSS right on the new front page so bear with me while I figure this out and sorry for the funny colors in the interim.