Post-Thumb Revisited: Fix for Dreamhost users in 2.1.9.2a

Updated version is only for Dreamhost users (or those who can have the same kind of trouble).

Thanks to Tricky and Michael to have let me run some test. Hopefully, this will solve it for Dreamhost.

(I will have to think about simplifying the version numbers…)

19 Responses to “Post-Thumb Revisited: Fix for Dreamhost users in 2.1.9.2a”

  1. mike Says:

    where is this updated version located for download?

  2. alakhnor Says:

    On wordpress.org as usual: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alakhnors-post-thumb/

  3. Jo Says:

    I’ve deleted a previous dormant version of this plugin from two months ago and uploaded this version as I’m using Dreamhost, things were going smooth when I used the sidebar widget (random post thumbs) but then I noticed that the default image is being shown over and over again with multiple page refreshes and even in different browsers, a random thumb list would not change.

    I’m using the wp-cache plugin, is there any conflict with that?

    I’ve been fiddling with settings for hours without solving this problem.

  4. alakhnor Says:

    Do you have a link?

  5. alakhnor Says:

    Try to generate the table in options again.

  6. Jo Says:

    I’ve included my site (nsfw) in this comment entry.

    I’ve noticed a few things (firefox 2),

    1. 80% of the time, the post-thumb shows the default image instead of the post’s thumb. Is this normal, as it takes a few days to generate all the thumbs for each post instead of on-the-fly?
    2. Using the random-pt widget, I reloaded the homepage a few times but the same set of thumbs showed up, is this a wp-cache issue? If I clicked a thumb, a different set of random thumbs will show up but not if I refresh the same page.
    3. There was one occurrence where an unpublished draft’s pic showed up.

    “Try to generate the table in options again.”

    I did troubleshoot this on the first day by deleting all the thumbs, then using the ‘regenerate table’ option on all posts, I’m still seeing this anomaly.

  7. alakhnor Says:

    I’ll have to run some tests with wp-cache. It may be related to this. I’ll keep you inform.

  8. tricky Says:

    it works fine on WP 2.3.3 on Dreamhost :)

  9. alakhnor Says:

    Yes! :)

  10. alakhnor Says:

    Jo> As I thought, random function cannot work with wp-cache. Actually, it does work but will only change the random selection each time the cache is refreshed.
    1.No, it’s not normal. When you edit a post, the image to thumbnailed should be selected then and the thumbnail created first time page is refreshed. How much memory do you have available on your server?
    2.See above.
    3. This one’s weird as draft shouldn’t be in the database…

  11. Jo Says:

    “As I thought, random function cannot work with wp-cache. Actually, it does work but will only change the random selection each time the cache is refreshed.”

    Okay, that’s one of the tradeoffs of wp-cache. I guess I’ll have to live with that. I love random-pt too much not to use it.

    “No, it’s not normal. When you edit a post, the image to thumbnailed should be selected then and the thumbnail created first time page is refreshed.

    I’ve tried deactivating wp-cache and testing page refreshs, different sets of thumbs do come up but I’m still seeing the default image quite a lot, instead of the correct thumbs. It’s been about a week of usage, I’m seeing 322 thumbnails in the folder, that should be more since there’s more than a thousand posts with pics.

    “How much memory do you have available on your server?”

    Here’s the reply from my host. “I believe he asking that because perhaps his script resizes thumbs on the fly and the GD/Image Magick modules do use their fair share when they
    generate thumbs (as well as quite a bit of CPU sometimes). We cant tell you how much memory we officially allow you, but please keep it in the double digit megabytes. :)”

  12. alakhnor Says:

    Unfortunately, Post-Thumb uses gd and no imagemagik which is much less resource consuming.
    Keep in mind that, with gd, a jpeg uses an incredible amount of memory. A 1000×1000 image can use from 8MB to 15MB or more depending on quality, encoding,…and I guess you’re using high-quality picture. If memory is the issue, I guess you’ll see only rather small picture appear.

  13. Nicola Greco Says:

    when i install plugin on 2.3.3 option-> Post thumb doesn’t appear… what do i must do?

  14. alakhnor Says:

    In which directory have you installed post-thumb?

  15. Nicola Greco Says:

    in /wp-content/plugins isn’t it?

  16. alakhnor Says:

    Yes.

  17. Nicola Greco Says:

    So, now it works, thanks.

    you can see at http://bongolinux.com

  18. Jo Says:

    “Unfortunately, Post-Thumb uses gd and no imagemagik which is much less resource consuming. Keep in mind that, with gd, a jpeg uses an incredible amount of memory. A 1000×1000 image can use from 8MB to 15MB or more depending on quality, encoding,…and I guess you’re using high-quality picture. If memory is the issue, I guess you’ll see only rather small picture appear.”

    Do you mean the generation of thumbs from fairly large pictures will be quite cpu/memory intensive? I was using pt-random on the sidebar with about 3 150×125 thumbs (rounded corners,png) linked to posts and incidentally in the month of Feb to early March, my site went down about 3 times, due to high server load and needing manual reboots.

    I can’t be sure that it’s the thumbnail generation that’s causing this, but I took down the widget for the time being , regrettably so.. I really loved the random thumbs.

    I wonder if there’s a way to reduce the load, is it the png thumb using more resources? Are jpgs better?

  19. alakhnor Says:

    If you’re using sharpening or rounded option, it will certainly increase memory usage. There are not much difference between png and jpeg. It all depends on how they’re encoded. png with transparency will get bigger.

    The inconvenient with random is that when it finds a randomly choosen post for the first time, it will generate the thumbnail. So, it can be often if you have a large number of posts. Other than that, it shouldn’t use a lot more resources than other.

    How many posts do you have on your blog?

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