Mick's World

I just spent the last couple of hours trying to work out why the admin section of my site wasn’t being displayed after login. I tried many things including overwriting the admin section with a clean version, installing Wordpress from scratch and exporting the old database into the new one, as well as copying the wp-content directory from old to new.

None of what i tried worked. The page remained blank upon loading. All that was being displayed in the admin section was the title and when i viewed the source code only the start of the page up to a point was being loaded. I then located the file that was being loaded and realised that the point that it was being loaded to was do_action(’admin_head’);.

I proceeded to comment this out to see what would happen and what do you know, the admin section worked. Even more curious was the fact that now that i had disabled this section of the code the wp version check plugin was no longer being displayed due to being loaded with the do_action(’admin_head’).

After discovering this i disabled the plugin and uncommented the do_action(’admin_head’) section. Again the admin section loaded.

This was extremely strange as i had made no changes since this last worked. I decided to take a look at the plugin’s website which wasn’t loading. I then took a look in the plugin’s file and saw that it was loading the update information from the site which appeared to be down.

So when the plugin was being loaded with the admin_head it was unable to connect to the server it was retrieving the information from which was halting the remaining loading of the admin page.

It was a real pain in the ass to discover something so small, which could have been avoided by timing out the plugin script and continuing to load the remainder of the page. Anyway it’s fixed up now, anyone else using the plugin may experience the same problems of the admin page not loading after login. If so just comment out the do_action(’admin_head’); section of the admin_header.php file so you can access the plugins section to disable the plugin for the time being.

Update
The site that the plugin was using for update information is back online now so the plugin can be re-activated.

I wrote about a new portfolio site of mine the other day. Well it’s been online for a few days now and a not-quite-as-good version was up for a couple of weeks before that.

After looking through a few stats for both this site and the portfolio site i noticed a couple of people must have put 2 and 2 together and worked out where my portfolio site is. So i may as well just post the link here now so others can view it, and to give it some traffic of it’s own.
You can check out my portfolio at mickreal.com.

Well we’re well into spring now and the weather is great. Had a bit of a fizzer of an apparent severe storm yesterday, but it hasn’t rained properly in Brisbane in over a year.

With spring comes spring cleaning, some may have noticed a while ago something on the micksworld.com page and it’s been updated again. There are going to be a few changes around here in the attempt to get this site to where I’d like it to be. I’ve already updated the design once since starting the blog in March and there have been a few minor changes since that update.

Besides working on some new stuff I’ve been getting my portfolio together and writing my resume. I’ve made many attempts in the past to write a successful resume but just didn’t have the patience. Now I’ve made myself sit down and write it out so that it’s done.

I’ve applied for a couple of jobs so far. One looked very promising, i got a call and was asked to have an interview. The job was basically exactly what i was looking for, however after a weeks wait (which seemed like a month) i was unsuccessful. Although i think that i was pretty close being on a short list of about 5 out of 30 people for interviews.

I was thinking of writing a post about my experience for that particular occasion as there were a few things i noticed a few positives and negatives during the process. I might try to put something together over the next week or so. I the mean time it’s back to looking for jobs, self employment is slow at the moment. Once my portfolio is up and running I’ll post a link so you can take a look.

Yet again i've been busy with a few projects which i'm hoping to have completed soon. One of which is some new stuff for this site, but i won't say too much about that at the moment.

Spring is on our doorstep (well down under anyway) and as with many things that happen in spring there will be some form of growth with this site.

Anyway until my next post, which will hopefully be a little more substantial, here's a few sites to check out.

• Cadaceus - Very nice flash design
• gotAPI - Great programming reference tool
• Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison - Some very interesting photography
• Giant Girl Doll - This is some trippy shit

So here we are. Almost 6 months and 50 posts since the Mick’s World blog started.

In that time a variety of topics have been written about. There have been 11,634 written words. The site also had a re-align a couple of months after it’s birth and many small changes have occurred. Anyway it’s good to be here and the site will continue to grow and evolve. The only way is up.

So what does the future hold? More posts, higher concentration on quality, more informative posts and how-to articles. Sometime in the near future i’m looking at another re-alignment which will almost be a rebirth of Mick’s World. As it will add a lot more content, features and more intuitive layout for exploring the information.

Thanks for your support in reading my thoughts so far. You will not be disappointed with future evolutions.