Michael Gibbs » Page 4

Author: Michael Gibbs

I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.

I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.

I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.

I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).

Manage Google Apps Account using Google-Apps-Manager

Been tasked with managing a Google Apps account for your company only to find that you are being asked to do many things on behalf of your user? Something that would require that you login as the user to make the changes?

Well, consider this a problem of the past. I’ve just recently discovered a new tool called google-apps-manager.  This command line tool is a veritable swiss army knife to help you manage your domain.
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IIS7 and 530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible

Like many others (as evidenced by the various posts and searches on this topic), I do this infrequently enough that it has come up and bit me in the a** too many times so hopefully by memorializing my idiocy in blog post form, I will NOT forget this lesson I learned when managing FTP users in IIS7.

If you an experienced IIS manager (6.x and better) you are most likely to get caught by this. You’ve probably done all the normal steps (added users to Windows, added to correct group, given write access to the correct folder) and yet nothing seems to work for you on this new users… Well, if when you’ve logged in using the corect username and password and still get the dreaded “530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible” message, then this should resolve your problem.

If you go to the virtual directory you are looking to allow access to in IIS, make sure that you go into the “FTP Authorization” and create a rule for this user.

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Search Gmail by Date Range

For those of us who live in our Gmail inbox (inside of Google Apps of course) and who have done so for years know that it can be difficult to find a specific email that occurred within a specific time period; especially if it is a commonly occurring word.

My frustration at having to page through page after page of results lead me to search a little bit on the web for the answer and discovered the before: and after: search modifiers.
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Powershell Backup to S3 Script

Have you ever used Powershell? Well, neither have I. Until recently I’d been happily scripting my server maintenance routines in batch files (I know, I know) but figured when one of our dev servers turned out to need to be a Windows Server 2012, I found that my tried and true batch files would need to be massively rewritten so I figured, time to dive into PowerShell.

There were three aspects of what the routine that I needed to address

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More Fun with php.ini: Allow WordPress Plugin to Access Data On Remote Server

Have you ever found that a WordPress plugin that works fine on one web host isn’t working as you would have expected when you move it to a new webhost? We recently experienced this with a plugin that reaches out to a remote server to collect XML data to be displayed by the plugin. The problem manifested itself as a blank page where the plugin’s shortcode SHOULD have displayed formatted version of the remote data. 

The quickest way to diagnose issues like this is to modify the wp-config.php so that the line “define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);” reads as “define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);” temporarily so you can view the errors that WordPress by default will hide from you.

Doing so in this case returned the following error:

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Make Sure WordPress Has Enough Memory

I’ve just wrapped up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to debug a problem with some client sites that were hosted on WestHost. These sites are cookie cutters in that the theme and the plugins are the same as was running on other hosting companies (BlueHost, HostMonster, HostGator, iPage, etc) but on this new (to me) hosting company, whenever I’d go into the Pages administration of the WordPress dashboard, it would throw a 500 server error. 

Turning on debug in wp-config.php would show errors talking about deprecated functions but nothing that SHOULD throw the 500 server we were experiencing. What was odd was that one of the affected plugins was WordPress SEO from Yoast; the irony being that the only reason I went to WestHost was becuase of the recommendation by Joost de Valk himself (owner/developer at Yoast). All the affected plugins were:

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