Well, it was this morning.  I didn’t realize it until I went to schedule a blog post for 12 hours later and it published immediately. I was concerned and actually went to blame WordPress first (I’m really not sure why).  However, when I was looking at the time preferences in the General settings area of the site I noticed something really strange.  My timezone was correct, but the date WP was showing was way off. This meant that my CentOs5 server’s time was way off.

I did a little research and found an article called “Setting the time of your system“.  They gave me some good solutions on how to fix the issue, after reading it I was ready to go.  I tried a couple things in the order they said and found myself a little confused. So naturally, I started trying things till they worked.  This is not always the best solution, but I figured I could deal with a timing issue if I messed it up worse than it was.

For my CentOs 5 server I did the following, which actually worked and set the time perfectly.

First, I checked the date the server had, which turned out to be way off.

Then I looked to see if ntpd (the automatic time adjustment service) was running, it was.

I tried ntpdate to reset the time on the server, but it complained about the socket being in use.

My solution was to stop ntpd and then run ntpdate again, which worked!

A simple restart of the ntpd service and the time was correct!

So, the solution was to do the following steps:

I added “date” on the end, because you want to verify that the time actually did reset. Best of Luck!

I really wanted to use WordPress Mu for Focus Of The Week, which is a site where I give people blogs and they post on their topic once a week.

WordPress Mu is a multi user platform for WordPress where you can manage multiple blogs from the same administrative area.  It is a great tool for managing multiple blogs, and on DreamHost it would be perfect!  However, they do not have a way for you to do dynamic DNS unless you are paying extra for DreamHost PS, so there is a little extra work that goes into setting it up.

So how do we do this? Follow these steps and you are on your way:

First, make sure your domain is propagated to your DreamHost server. Second, you need to make sure that WordPress Mu is on the server and installed. You can do this pretty easy with the installation instructions and a little elbow grease if you haven’t done it before. It should not take you longer than 20 minutes, if it does you might want to phone a friend.

Now that Mu is set up, you may have noticed the Blogs administration area under “Site Admin”:

Add a blog to the next page by filling out this form:

Once that is in the system, you will notice if you go to that domain that you cannot see the blog.  You still need to set up your DreamHost DNS to know about the domain.  The easiest way to do this is through the DreamHost Panel, NOT AT YOUR REGISTRAR.  The reason is simple, DreamHost already has the DNS for your main domain, so all requests are going to them, even for subdomains. Also, when you set up the subdomain with them it will propagate so much faster than with your registrar.

You do this through the DreamHost Domain Manager:

Once you submit the domain, you just have to wait a little while. Sometimes it is really fast and sometimes it takes up to a couple hours. What I do is just check the URL in my browser every half hour to an hour.

You can now host a WordPress Mu site on DreamHost!

If you need hosting for a blog site, DreamHost is a pretty good way to do it.  For a single blog, they have One-Click-Installs which makes installing regular WordPress a breeze.  To get a huge discount, $50 off any normal hosting fees you can use Promo Code: PROJECTLAUNCHER