Feedwordpress / Gzip plugin problems - can't access admin panel

Yesterday, after all the hoo-haa with Feedwordpress refusing to activate, I ran into another problem: I couldn't access the feedwordpress admin panel! on FOUR sites.. All I get is "page unavailable", or the dreaded error 324 in Chrome (don't start me on that one). So I backtracked - what ELSE had I changed recently? The answer was I had used plugin to switch on GZIP compression on the affected sites. Deactivating the plugins "Force Gzip", or "Wordpress Gzip" allowed me back in to the feedwordpress admin panel. I have no idea why switching on Gzip kills the feedwordpress admin panel, but it does. You heard it here.

Wordpress - Feedwordpress - Will not activate!

This was a bit of a problem. My site, which relies on FeedWordPress (fwp) for updates, had crashed. The only way to get the site back up was to disable all active plugins via the database (see my other posts), and then re-activate the plugins one-by-one to find the culprit. Turns out that the culprit was FeedWordPress. FeedWordPress does this when there are a LOT of links to check. Like my site. The only way to fix this quickly is to edit the database directly using the hosting control panel. DO NOT edit the RSS links using the inbuilt links editor - it will chop the end off the links, destroying them. It will chop the affiliate bits off the end.. 1. Get the ID of the link category that fwp is looking at. To find out, you need to know it's name. I called mine "FWP". Yours may be "Blogroll". Use the wordpress links editor, but DO NOT edit any links. Now look in the WP-Terms table, and find the record with that name. Make a note of the link_category_id. 2. You are also going to need an empty link category. Use the wordpress link category editor to create one, (I called mine "FWP-DUMMY") or just select an existing link category with no links in it. Note down the link_category_id. 3. Open the wp-options table and look for the feedwordpress_category record. It probably will not be on the first page.. Edit it. The number in there should be the link_category_id for your existing category. Change it to the number for the empty link category. Save it. 4. In Wordpress, activate FeedWordPress. It should work OK now. That's because it's looking at an empty category and has nothing to check. 5. Go back to the wp-options table, and change the feedwordpress category back to the original value. Save it. Feedwordpress is now up and running. Finally, make a note of the link-category_ids for the FWP category and the Empty category, so you won't have to mess about next time.

QuirkyCars.Net - New features..

Implemented wp-ebay-ads, and integrated it with feedwordpress.
Feedwordpress adds custom field "ebay search" to all syndicated posts.
The template has been edited to call wp-ebay-ads, IF there is something in that custom field.
Et voila, targeted ebay ads on each individual page.
** this ONLY happens on individual pages, not front page **
Full description on Wordpress.org..

WORDPRESS: Updating FEEDWORDPRESS by a real CRON Job..

The Background:

I have a Wordpress site (Supercars-For-Sale.Com) running on a free hosting account (with x10hosting - recommended!)

The site uses FEEDWORDPRESS to pull in posts from RSS feeds. It works well.

The problem:

I need the site to automatically update it's posts from the RSS feeds, because I don't have the time to do it manually.
If I set FWP to automatically update (using Wordpress inbuilt scheduling, WP-Cron), the only options are:
- Update before page load (Catastrophic page load times!)
- Update after page load (checks for jobs after every page load..)

Setting either one of these options will get you suspended on x10hosting or 000webhost free accounts.
Rightly so, these are shared servers, and you are hogging them!
(000webhost will CANCEL your account without warning - beware :( . x10hosting will suspend you, but at least they'll tell you about it :) , and unsuspend you on request.)

The solution:
FEEDWORDPRESS has an additional feature: update via web page.
If you send a request to: http://domain-name?update_feedwordpress=1 then all your syndicated input feeds are updated.

To make this work, all you need to do is set up a cron job (Scheduled task), that executes the following statement:
/usr/bin/curl --silent http://domain-name?update_feedwordpress=1

** Don't panic! a "Cron Job" is how a web server (Unix) runs scheduled tasks. You add jobs to it, tell it what to run and how often, and that's it.
"curl" is simply a command that accesses web pages from the command line.
Most webservers will have curl installed. **

x10hosting uses the cpanel graphical interface for everything. Even Cron jobs. Simply set-up the scheduling, enter the command, and that's it. (If it says there was a problem, try it again. It'll then say that the job already exists. Hit F5 to refresh, and the job is there..)

If you are using command-line crontab, then use the following statement:
*/HOURS * * * * /usr/bin/curl --silent http://domain-name?update_feedwordpress=1

Notes:
1. Replace "HOURS" with the number of hours between updates.
2. Replace "domain-name" with YOUR domain-name.

Other things to try:
If you are on a free hosting account, you could try turning off the inbuilt WP-CRON system. It's rubbish anyway, and only checks for jobs exactly when you don't want it to. (just before, or after a pageload). All you need is a big bot visit, and it's Hello, account suspension again. Been there. Done that to death
Simply edit the WP-CONFIG.php file, and add the following entry:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

It needs to be at the beginning of the file, with the other "define"s.
** Please note that this will disable all WP_CRON activity. No scheduled jobs will run. (future-dated posts will not appear).