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CommonProblems

My site won't load or stylesheets/images don't appear

The first thing to check is your domain preference. It's possible it's set to an incorrect value (did you import your preference from your local install with your domain preference set to 'localhost'?). The easiest way to fix this is to run the rake command:

Where mydomain.com is the correct domain value. For instance, if you've installed SimpleLog at blog.yoursite.com, you'd run:

Running the rake command without the value argument will reset the domain value to empty string (''), but you should set the domain preference to the full and correct domain so that RSS feeds have the correct URL in links.

Also, make sure you uploaded the public/.htaccess file.

I do not have SSH access to my website

Some web hosts—especially in shared enviroments—do not offer SSH access. There are two possible solutions to this problem:

1. You will probably have cron jobs if your host suplies cPanel. Follow the installation instructions, and setup any commands as a one-time cron job trough cPanel.
2. The alternate way is to compleate the setup locally on your own machine. Follow the installation instructions locally and then upload your files and databases to your remote host. If you set your domain preference locally to something other than '' (empty string), you should change the value in your remote database to the correct setting for your hosted site (ex: mysite.com).

If you have shared hosting with [http://www.lunarpages.com/ Lunarpages]: Follow the installation instructions, and submit a support ticket to get your application built.

My site is slow! (Development mode versus production mode)

When SimpleLog is run in development mode, theme items are not cached and the application will load slower. This is necessary because it allows you to make changes to your theme and see them reflected instantly. Once you've completed your theme, you should make sure your application is running in production mode. Most web hosts run apps only in production mode, so if you're uploading your site to, say, TextDrive, it's almost defintely set to go.

In a rare case that your app is not in production mode, you can force it by opening config/environment.rb and adding this line to the top of the file:

Save the file and restart your app/server.

My CSS/theme changes aren't appearing

In production mode, all theme items are cached and changes you make will not appear until you clear that cache. The theme cache is always automatically cleared when you save preferences, but you can also clear it manually by clicking on the "Clear the theme cache" link in the upper-left of the preferences section. When developing a theme, you should be running in development mode, which will show changes instantly.

My theme isn't working, I see weird path strings all over

If you find that your theme isn't working and you're seeing things like, "..//themes//themename//file//" when you view your site, it means your theme contains references to files with incorrect locations. You should check your <%= render :partial... references to ensure they're linking to files that exist.

I get a 500 error after importing old entries from Movable Type

If you just imported your entries and start getting a 500 error, a likely cause is that your author_id field has been incorrectly set in the database.

You can run the following SQL command on your simplelog DB to clear this up (n = your author id and y = whatever was set during import):

UPDATE posts SET author_id = n WHERE author_id =y