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If you’re a WordPress user, you no doubt have used the excellent Related Entries plugin before.

One thing about that plugin and its variants is that it only shows related posts from the same blog. While these posts may increase readership for the blogs, it would be much better if readers could read related posts and articles from other sites. That would expand the minds of readers by allowing them to gain insights from others who are writing about similar topics.

Today, I released a new web service called RelatedToThis. It fills the gap that I just mentioned above.

RelatedToThis is unique in a way that it is presented as a data feed, encoded in JSON format. I envision that developers will take the data feed and write plugins or widgets around it. It isn’t WordPress or platform-specific, since it’s just text.

It is also an invite-only service. The reason for this is to ensure the quality of sites joining RelatedToThis. If you’d like to join RelatedToThis, you can find a list of people with invitations to give out here.

I hope this service will fill a niche that benefits everyone..

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The MySQL server that WP Text Ads runs on (5.0.32-Debian_7etch1-log) has been shutting down by itself over the last few weeks. Up to today, I still don’t know why. The error log doesn’t say anything other than that MySQL shut down gracefully.

Downtime is really bad for WP Text Ads. So it is important that there’s a way to monitor the MySQL server and detect if it has shut down.

I found a wonderful script from Bash Shell Script Directory to do this. Made a few modifications to it and it has worked very well for me.

Here is the modified script. It restarts MySQL server if it is killed or not working for any reason. When the script detects MySQL is not running (by sending ping requests to MySQL), it tries to restart using /etc/init.d/mysql and sends an email to you indicating the status.

This script should be run as a cron job.


#!/bin/bash
#
# This script is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.0 or above
#

# mysql server hostname
MHOST="localhost"

#path to MySQL daemon start/stop script.
MSTART="/etc/init.d/mysql start"

# Email address to send notification
EMAILID="username@domain.com"

# path to mail program
MAILCMD="$(which mail)"

# path mysqladmin
MADMIN="$(which mysqladmin)"

MAILMESSAGE="/tmp/mysql.fail.$$"

# see if MySQL server is alive or not
$MADMIN --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "" >$MAILMESSAGE
        echo "Error: MySQL Server is not running/responding ping request">>$MAIL
MESSAGE
        echo "Hostname: $(hostname)" >>$MAILMESSAGE
        echo "Date & Time: $(date)" >>$MAILMESSAGE
        # try to start mysql
        $MSTART>/dev/null
        # see if it is started or not
        o=$(ps cax | grep -c ' mysqld$')
        if [ $o -eq 1 ]; then
                sMess="MySQL Server MySQL server successfully restarted"
        else
                sMess="MySQL server FAILED to restart"
        fi
        # Email status too
        echo "Current Status: $sMess" >>$MAILMESSAGE
        echo "" >>$MAILMESSAGE
        echo "*** This email generated by $(basename $0) shell script ***" >>$MA
ILMESSAGE
        echo "*** Please don't reply this email, this is just notification email
 ***" >>$MAILMESSAGE
        # send email
        $MAILCMD -s "MySQL server" $EMAILID < $MAILMESSAGE
else # MySQL is running  and do nothing
        :
fi
# remove file
rm -f $MAILMESSAGE

You need to save the above script as the ‘root’ user. Then edit your cron (as ‘root’) to run this script.

I make sure cron runs this script every 3 minutes (assuming I named this script check_mysql):

*/3 * * * * bash /root/check_mysql

I hope this tip helps anyone who’s facing the same unsolvable problem as me.

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