How Twitter Fixed My WordPress Blog Theme

Sometimes you get in a situation where you feel like you just hit a brick wall and anything you do won’t work in fixing a particular problem or issue. Did this happened to you too? You probably know what I’m talking about. Same thing happened to me a couple of days ago when I decided to change my WordPress theme on my blog. I’ll tell you in a minute what Twitter has to do with all this.

I found a great looking theme, professionally designed, produced by the famous WooThemes Team. The theme I’m talking about is the one you probably see in front of you right now. It’s called The Original Premium News.

I knew what I have to do in order to change the theme in my WordPress Admin area so I went right ahead and changed it. But little did I know that this, apparently simple task of changing a theme on my blog, would cause me so much “pain”.

Now, this nice looking theme has an open-source script integrated that re-sizes images and thumbnails on the front page, automatically. This script is called thumb.php and it wouldn’t work for me even if I “begged” it.  The problem that occurred was eventually solved by looking for information about thumb.php on various forums, bulletin boards, and developer groups. I’ll give you the full details below.

But the interesting fact is that I had an idea at some point, when I was running out of options, to send out a tweet on Twitter and see if someone would respond. Minutes pased by and nothing happened. I was dissapointed, to say at least. But suddenly my followers started to respond and doing their best to help me out. Even though they couldn’t find a technical solution to my problem, they did help me by supporting me and giving me confidence to go on and solve this issue.

Keeping in mind that Twitter was my last resource I could think of, and that I was ready to give up and delete the theme and set up another one, you probably know where I was standing (read: “edge-of-a-nervous-brake-down”). But luckily for me, my friends on Twitter persisted and eventually I got the idea of contacting one of the developers of thumbs.php, directly on Twitter, and I got a response from him (Darren Hoyt) in a couple of minutes, directing me to a forum built specially for this purpose.

So, I can’t thank enough my friends on Twitter who inspired me to keep trying. These are a few of them and I apologize if I missed somebody: @dshiggins, @darrenhoyt, @lukerumley, @shoestringing, @a3austin, @simonerubin, @mcleodg, and probably many more who re-tweeted my “cry for help”. Thank‘s again guys, you ROCK!

Now for the more technical aspect of this let me explain what to do and how to do it:

How To Fix thumb.php To Properly Display Images?

The best information I could get was the Google Code forum for open-source projects. You can see the original timthumb.php developements and you can also contribute:

http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

After I tryied everything from changing file permissions with my FTP software, to altering the thumb.php script and nothing worked, I found the answer I was looking for: It wasn’t me, it was my Hosting Provider, which is HostGator for me. Found the answer here:

http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/issues/detail?id=8

If you are on HostGator, all you have to do is contact them by going to:

http://www.hostgator.com/

Click where it says: “Click here. Live Chat” on the upper-right corner of the web-page and tell the followings:

add following rules [ 1234234,340151 ] to mod_security for www.yourwebsite.com
Please whitelist for the domain

That is all you have to do. Wait a couple of minutes and you’ll probably see the images on the front page of your web-site.

Since thumb.php or timthumb.php is an open-source project, more and more WordPress theme developers use this little script and integrate it on their projects. So keep your eyes open because I’ve seen thumb.php used on other themes as well.

Here are a couple of more resources to help you:

http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2008/04/02/timthumb-php-script-released/

http://www.woothemes.com/2008/10/troubleshooting-image-resizer-thumbphp/

http://www.wpconfig.com/2008/10/16/troubleshooting-image-resizer-thumbphp/

http://www.darrenhoyt.com/support/forum/timthumb

If you have other questions or issues go ahead and drop me a line. I’ll give my best shot in helping you solve any issues you might have.

Tagged as: Blogging, free wordpress theme, high quality images, image resizing script, success, targeted traffic, thumb.php, timthumb.php, Twitter, woothemes free theme, www.twitter.com