Yesterday I decided to try something new for the website. I had been meaning to have my blog cross-post over to my MySpace as well as over to my LiveJournal for a while now. So, I finally decided to take a look for a MySpace cross-post plugin for WordPress. I managed to find Roderick Russell’s MySpace cross-post plugin, and went ahead and installed it. However, on my first try to get something crossed over, the plugin died with a error saying curl_init was not defined. I did some looking, and found that the plugin required curl support in PHP. So, I went ahead and recompiled PHP with curl support, and tried again.
The same thing happened.
Obviously I was a bit confused. I checked the configure logs, and the configure script DID find my server’s curl install. I tried recompiling again, and the same thing happened. I even deleted the source code from the server, reunpacked it, and recompiled with no effect. Nothing I found on Google helped me, either. I even asked twice on #php in Freenode, and was completely ignored.
Later in the evening, I was talking to ShoeUnited, and decided to take another look at it. I wrote a quickie phpinfo page so he and I could see the built-in support, when I noticed something. The PHP plugin Apache was using was compiled/installed in December. My install hadn’t been updating the plugin file. So, I moved the plugin filename, and reinstalled. No effect; the plugin wasn’t there. So, I manually copied the plugin from the source code directory to the Apache plugin directory. Still no go, as it came up with an error. I was stumped.
Finally, I looked through one of the logs, and I saw what the problem was. I double-checked against another log, and I suddenly felt like an idiot. I had two separate Apache builds on the server: one was an Apache 1.3 install that was in use, and the other was an Apache 2.2 install that had issues and never went into production. I was compiling the source code against the latter.
Once I recompiled the source code against the correct Apache build, the plugin started working properly. So, now whenever I make a post on here, a notification is posted on my MySpace blog. It’s not something I NEEDED to do, but it was a good exercise. :-)
Now I just need to sit down and figure out at some point why my Apache 2.2 install wasn’t working properly. It’s not a priority, of course, as I have a working Apache install (and the 1.3 branch is still getting security updates), but it would be nice to figure out where I went wrong… :-)