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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Apps

Things That Don’t Get Firefox To Start Loading Pages Again When It Decides It Doesn’t Want To

Firefox as of v 148 (actually a bit earlier than that, but that's what I'm on right now) frequently decides not to load pages anymore. You enter a URL or click on a link and get the status message "Waiting for [URL]..." and you can wait as long as you care to.

When this begins, your only choice is to restart Firefox.

Here is a list of "solutions" to the problem from around the web, which I have tried and found do not fix the problem:
• Turning off DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox Settings
• Flushing MacOS's DNS cache.
• Going to about:networking and clearing Firefox's DNS cache
• Going into about:config and changing network.dns.disableIPv6 from false to true
• Opening in "troubleshooting mode" or disabling all extensions
• Turning VPN off
• Turning VPN on

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log

Playlist shortcodes not working in Chrome because Lightspeed cache is set to defer jquery

Long story short, I got a message from a user that audio playlists were working in Firefox but not Chrome. The Chrome console had an error that "jQuery" wasn't defined, but typing jQuery into console did show a function definition. Turns out, in Lightspeed Cache's JS Delayed Includes, I had entered the word jquery by itself on a line, with a note to myself that something was causing a browser flash if I didn't do that. But removing this made the playlist shortcodes work on Chrome again. Ergo: don't defer jQuery.

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private » Programming Hacks Used In This Site

War And Precedence: Plugin positioning of unpositioned elements that aren’t yet positioned by later-loading stylesheets: A CSS Odyssey

So, I had a crazy problem. You'll notice that there's various draggable elements on this site... such as the "Kupietools" plugin tabs seen at left, the occasional "the site is being worked on right now" notices that pop up, etc. You can drag them around with your mouse.

This is done with a plugin (also available as a standalone javascript module, a few versions behind the plugin as I write this) that retrofits code onto various HTML elements by giving the plugin the classnames it needs to make interactive.

I was doing some optimization on the site loading to speed things up, such as getting WordPress to load a lot of CSS file late so as not to interfere with initial page load stats. (This is a whole art, beyond the scope of this article.)
Suddenly…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Web » Email setup)

Resolving cloudflare error “The number of lookups on your SPF record exceed the allowed limit of 10. This will result in emails failing SPF authentication”

I got the error "The number of lookups on your SPF record exceed the allowed limit of 10. This will result in emails failing SPF authentication" in my Cloudflare DNS dashboard.

My spx record for, say, kupietz.com was "v=spf1 include:_spf.myEmailHost.com include:kupietz.com ~all"

Turns out, the problem is, every include can get parsed to be multiple servers. the include:kupietz.com apparently causes a recursive loop, creating more than 10 lookups. I updated it to "v=spf1 ip4:[my server's external IP address] include:_spf.google.com ~all", removing the recursive lookup, and adding my server's IP so it can send me administrative notices.

Also today my ISP changed my IP address unexpectedly... all DNS updated.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Web » WordPress » Yoast
Posted inIT Grimoire Posted in genresTroubleshootingWebYoast AnnoyancesWordpress

CURL and Browser get different page versions (301 redirects, content changed, etc. — due to Yoast url parameter stripping only for non-logged-in users)

I had a truly maddening problem where my /embed/ functionality was sometimes returning full pages to CURL commands and online services like redirect-checker.org, etc.

It turned out, it was Yoast's URL parameter stripping. I had failed to update Yoast's settings with some new parameters I was using, and what Yyoast never tells you is that when you're logged in, it lets everything work fine, and only strips parameters for non-logged in users. It just lets you proceed on your way thinking everything is working fine until you can't figure out why curl -I https://mysite.com/blah?param1¶m2 is getting a 301 redirect while https://mysite.com/blah?param1¶m2 is loading fine in your browser. This is especially fun on sites like mine where things like /embed/ and ?embed get written back and forth to each other internally.

I lost several hours to this.

Yoast's docs say there's a way of registering parameters but,…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » SQL
Posted inIT Grimoire

SQL query to list all WordPress post revisions for archiving

Here's the SQL query to get all post revisions, which I do prior to cleaning them out of the database, which seems to make it much faster:

SELECT p.*
FROM [posts table name] p
WHERE (p.post_type = 'post' OR p.post_type = 'page') -- Include posts/pages
AND (p.post_date BETWEEN '2020-01-01' AND '2029-07-01') -- Adjust date range
OR (p.post_type = 'revision' AND p.post_parent IN (
SELECT ID FROM [posts table name]
WHERE post_date BETWEEN '2024-01-01' AND '2024-07-01'
));

To get just a count of revisions, change SELECT p.* to SELECT count(*).

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » rsync & rsnapshot
Posted inIT Grimoire

Speeding up rsnapshot (rsync) backups by removing wildcard paths from exclude

I removed a bunch of wildcard paths from rsnapshot.conf's exclude, and suddenly tonight my backup ran in a few minutes instead of taking over a day like it usually does.

Interesting, I've been looking off and on for at least the better part of a year for ways to lighten the load of rsnapshot's under-the-hood rsync backup commands, which reliably took up about half my CPU power almost continuously, and never found this tip before. You can see, plenty of wildcard paths removed, plus a few other things.

Here's a diff, rsnapshot.conf before changes (<) vs after (>):
< verbose 1
---
> verbose 4
120c120
< loglevel 2
---
> loglevel 4
143a144,146
> rsync_short_args -Wa
> #-W is transfer whole files without prescan, recommended for performance by https://serverfault.com/questions/639458/rsync-taking-100-of-cpu-and-hours-to-complete
> #NOTE: if you set the above short…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Web Server
Posted inIT Grimoire

Performance troubleshooting & settings changes 2025aug29

Following several days of frequent freezes, I tried changing the following settings

updated in :

[opcache] original settings
;recommended by https://vpsfix.com/14433/virtualmin-post-installation-configuration-and-server-optimization-guide/
opcache.enable=
opcache.memory_consumption=
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=
opcache.max_accelerated_files=
opcache.validate_timestamps=
opcache.revalidate_freq=
opcache.save_comments=
;end recommendation

to

[opcache]
;recommended by https://vpsfix.com/14433/virtualmin-post-installation-configuration-and-server-optimization-guide/
opcache.enable=
opcache.memory_consumption=
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=
opcache.max_accelerated_files=
opcache.validate_timestamps=
opcache.revalidate_freq=
opcache.save_comments=

-
added var_dump(opcache_get_status()) to php status page to be able to monitor opcache usage

-
changed warning logs from E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT to
----
noticed contained a LOT of processes being stopped for tracing
turned off request_slowlog_timeout by setting to 0s in
had been 4s
---
I had turned on lightspeed at 1:45 am est , aug 26. Seems like more problems since then.

None of the above seem to help, still getting freezes maybe every 30 minutes. Next…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » File management
Posted inIT Grimoire

Directory and File Locations particular to this server

PHP config -
Includes:
- opcache settings
- error warnings

PHP slow log setup is in

PHP log -

PHP error and slow logs by pool are in

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » rsync & rsnapshot
Posted inIT Grimoire

Resolving an rsnapshot error — “rsync: –delete does not work without –recursive (-r) or –dirs (-d). rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1795)”

I discovered rsnapshot hadn't run in a few days. Checking /etc/rsnapshot.log, I found every recent day had this:

rsync: --delete does not work without --recursive (-r) or --dirs (-d). rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1795) [client=3.2.7]

A few days ago I had added the line rsync_short_args -W to /etc/rsnapshot.conf in an effort to get rsync to run without putting such a load on my system. Removing this and running rsnapshot -v hourly from the command line shows that without it, the first line of the rsync command was /usr/bin/rsync -ax --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \, but with it, the first line was /usr/bin/rsync -Wx --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \.

Changing the line rsync_short_args -W to rsync_short_args -Wa, with an a flag explicitly included, solved the problem. Apparently specifying custom short flags overrides at least one of the default flags.

Also: remember, when you run an…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » VMWare
Posted inIT Grimoire

VMWare VM unreachable via IP after reboot, even from host machine

My VWWare VM lost internet connectivity after a reboot. Even the host machine could not access any service on it. Http/https got 523 errors.

I powered down the VM, changed the networking to NAT, powered it back up, shut it down again, changed the networking back to Autodetect, booted it again, and everything seemed fine.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » rsync & rsnapshot
Posted inIT Grimoire

Reducing rsnapshot or rsync resource usage

I've had sporadic problems with clearing the WP cache causing the server to return 520 errors for a few minutes. Usually other sites on the same server are fine, it's specific to this vhost. Logging in via SSH, checking with htop, rsync is usually hogging most of the cpu. Restarting the fpm and then restarting Apache restores the website.

According to https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/361/rsnapshot-backup-reduce-high-load-with-ionice, the big bottleneck with rsync, which rsnaphot runs on, is i/o, not cpu, and rsync can actually tie up i/o such that a web server won't respond to http requests. This can be solved by making the rsnapshot command in crontab ionice -c 3 [rsnapshot command] instead of just the rsnapshot command, which tells rsync not to wait until the disk is idle before trying to access it. So I did. In fact, I made it nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 [rsnapshot command] although…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » WordPress
Posted inIT Grimoire

Deactivating, deleting, and completely removing a plugin that WordPress won’t let you deactivate

I installed the WordPress plugin LWS Optimize, which turned out to be unusably broken (which is the reason I'm not linking to it) and made my site unusable. To make matters worse, when I tried to deactivate it, it told me it deactivated... and was still active. I went in through FTP and deleted the plugin folder entirely, and then WordPress said it had been deactivated because it couldn't be found... and it still showed as present and activated in the plugin list.

So I added this to my theme's functions.php file:

add_action('admin_init', function() {
$active_plugins = get_option('active_plugins');
$plugin_to_remove = 'lws-optimize/lws-optimize.php';

if (($key = array_search($plugin_to_remove, $active_plugins)) !== false) {
unset($active_plugins[$key]);
update_option('active_plugins', array_values($active_plugins));
}
});

I then reloaded an admin page and removed that. That deactivated the plugin in the plugins list, but then when I hit the "delete" link, it said it…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log
Posted inIT Grimoire

Website returns 503 server errors, but no errors in logs

Had a weird one today. Last one website of the several of on this server suddenly started returning 503 (service unavailable) errors. There was nothing in the PHP error log or Apache error log. All server configs are already thoroughly optimized for performance. Other websites on the same server were functioning normally.

I didn't notice this at the time, but my uptime monitor didn't report an outage. When I used redirect-checker.com to check the status code, it returned 200, which should have been a clue, also.

Next time, before doing all sorts of arcane troubleshooting:
1. Try with a different browser
2. Is there a CDN? Try bypassing it.
3. Are you using a VPN? Try selecting a different endpoint (VPN server) if it will let you, or turning it off.

I use the NordVPN plugin in Firefox, and quic.cloud is my…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log

/Devlog

  • 2026mar18
    • Add fix for sections being duplicated when you have a type but no cat_id in othercatposts
    • Added "latest blog posts" to sidebar
    • Add admin settings section to specify which custom post types should appear in feed
    • Forget custom post types in feed plugin... added to Kupietools custom wordpress settings plugin
    • Create "custom post types in feeds" plugin
  • 2026mar17
    • added .wideleft and .wideright css classes
  • 2026mar15
    • Added webmention info to post meeta line
    • Add a loop to dedupe the category list in othercatposts before iterating it; sometimes parent is specified but it's already a category for the post so it got duplicated.
    • Add gradient to boxes on archive pages
    • Created Kupietools Prettier Excerpts plugin with github gist found at https://gist.github.com/swinggraphics/4ca551447bec03da281424c4ff85dcfd
    • Created Kupietools Prettier Excerpts plugin with github gist found at https://gist.github.com/swinggraphics/4ca551447bec03da281424c4ff85dcfd
    • Created Kupietools Prettier Excerpts plugin with github gist found at https://gist.github.com/swinggraphics/4ca551447bec03da281424c4ff85dcfd
      • …
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