Mitch Bartlett

How I Got Out of My Anti-Social Bubble (and How You Can Too)

April 30, 2014 by Mitch Bartlett Leave a Comment

Back when I lived in Chicago, I felt like I was at the center of the universe. I was working for a huge dot-com company and attended all the conferences I could. I met many people with many backgrounds. I couldn’t get on the ‘L’ train without running into somebody I knew.

In 2006 I moved to Sioux Falls and lost the ability to easily attend conferences and build relationships. Sioux Falls doesn’t exactly have the tech community Chicago does. As a result, I started focusing more on building relationships online through Twitter and Facebook. I spent many of the past few years alone in my office cranking out content while tweeting my thoughts on the weather and how excellent my gluten-free meal tasted today.

How to Move Your WordPress Site to a New Host

November 1, 2013 by Mitch Bartlett 2 Comments

It can be perplexing to move a WordPress website to a new host. There are quite a few steps, and if everything isn’t done correctly you could lose data or suffer downtime. There are a couple of ways you can go about migrating your site to a new host. If you’re a pro and are familiar with MySQL, I recommend you use the first method. If you’re a bit on the novice side, use Method 2. This tutorial does assume that you know your way around FTPing into your server and doing a few things in cPanel though.

Let’s get to it.

Finally Leaving Dreamhost

October 5, 2013 by Mitch Bartlett 5 Comments

Posts about web hosts sucking are very common. There are so many that I try to stay away from those types of posts, but Dreamhost’s customer service (or lack therof) motivates me to write this. I mean, they have to be #1 when it comes to ranking worst Customer Service experiences. If everybody had a web host, they would even beat Verizon in bad service. It wasn’t always this way with Dreamhost though.

Yet Another Social Icons Plugin

September 7, 2013 by Mitch Bartlett 12 Comments

I have been searching for the perfect plugin for WordPress that allows me to easily add social icons to via a widget. There are some good plugins out there, and a lot of bad ones. None of them had everything I needed though. The Simple Social Icons plugin came close. But it doesn’t include a few networks I need to use. So I decided I would build one based on the Simple Social Icons plugin.

I decided to name this plugin YASIP (Yet Another Social Icons Plugin). With this plugin, you can display icons in 1 of 3 different sizes and 1 of 4 different styles. Here’s a list of icons you’ll find with this plugin:

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
YouTube
Flickr
Pinterest
StumbleUpon
Google Plus
Instagram
Tumblr
Vine
WordPress
RSS

I welcome any suggestions or bugs you have in the Comments section.

Download YASIP 0.2 Beta Here

How to Get More Interested Followers On Twitter

August 31, 2013 by Mitch Bartlett Leave a Comment

Twitter is a fun site to say anything you like. It’s even more fun when you have a lot of loyal followers who interact with whatever you tweet. If you want more followers who genuinely dig what you’re tweeting, I’ve got some tips for you. If you came here not willing to put in work though, this is not the post for you. This is not some sure way to get 200,000 followers overnight. Going that route will only get you 200,000 zombie followers who won’t care what you have to say. Follow these tips instead.

Solve WordPress WP Super Cache Error “Page not cached by WP Super Cache. Could not get mutex lock.”

August 10, 2013 by Mitch Bartlett Leave a Comment

I recently attempted to get a new site up and running with WordPress and the WP Super Cache plugin on Dreamhost. After configuring everything and being confident things were working just great, I started receiving errors at the bottom of the page that said “Page not cached by WP Super Cache. Could not get mutex lock.”

The FAQ page for WP Super Cache mentions how this is a file locking issue. A possible solution would be to modify the wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and uncomment the following line:

$use_flock = true

It also mentions setting $sem_id to a different value. So I changed the following line:

$sem_id = 5419;

$sem_id = 5420;

These steps didn’t work. So I was lost as to what to do next.

Fortunately the WordPress Forums proved useful with the solution. As dragonwize suggests, I set the “wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock” to writable via FTP client and things started working once again.