php-fastcgi woe in blogland

At the end of last week I upgraded my server from Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty (and have since gone all the way up to Lucid, a process that was not as simple as I would have liked). As far as I could tell, everything had gone smoothly, but my blog was unavailable (which I discovered very quickly thanks to the automated Pingdom emails). My blog runs on php-fastcgi behind nginx, which had been very simple to install, but now, executing /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start resulted in an “OK” status but no PHP server actually running!

Isolating the correct command from the startup script eventually got it running (although I still can’t work out whether it really is the quotemarks around $DAEMONARGS that’s causing this problem or not), but it stops again after a couple of hours. I can only guess that this is because I’ve been running it as a simple sudo and without & – but surely start-stop-daemon should handle all this for me?!

Anyway, an investigation into PHP-FPM as an alternative is underway, and this here blog will be massively intermittent until then!

A tastier bookmarking tool

The practical stuff first.

In February 2009, inspired by Pete Prodoehl, I set up my own version of scuttle, an open source del.icio.us clone, and hacked it to auto-post my bookmarks to my del.icio.us account using the php-delicious library.

I have finally pushed this to github. My change is literally about ten lines of code, although as my delicious account testifies, it has bugs that I haven’t been bothered to fix. It is currently version 0.7.4 of scuttle, and I plan on merging it to the latest 0.9 in a day or two.

Update: actually it looks like I set this up in 2006, way before I remember!