I was up far too late last night tinkering with this WordPress beta version of my blog, I admit that. Moments after posting a comment over at DDtB inviting folks over for a preview, I enabled a “Friends” macro to point automatically to his blog. I set it to recognize his nick, ***Dave. Then I changed a couple of style options directly, in the style.php file that my husband David has warned me repeatedly not to mess with.
So I wasn’t sure what exactly I had done when I refreshed my screen to see my changes, and POOF!! No blog! No content, that is. Nothing visible in the posts, but it was still there in my editing screens in ecto and on the WP dashboard.
At almost 3 in the morning, it seemed like a good time to put off panicking until the morning, when David was conscious and could help me figure out just what the hell I had managed to screw up. The new WP software runs on PHP, and something I had done was preventing all my content from being displayed in all my posts.
This morning, I was scratching my head and moaning while my husband David combed the log for PHP errors. He traced it to the Twilight Friends Finder plugin, and I said “Hmm, I did add a name or two last night just before my posts disappeared, but the same plugin was working on the new Holy Moly WordPress blog, which uses the same theme.”
David had a big “Aha!” moment and remarked that the ***’s in Dave’s name were being processed as an invalid regular expression in the main content loop, causing it to say “I’m gonna die here.”
AAARGH! I had wondered about those asterisks in ***Dave’s nom de blog last night. Now it’s set to link to his page using a different search string.
David disabled the TFF plugin, and wa-la! Lafayette, we are here!
A little editing, and the plugin is working again.
So thanks for all the excitement, Dave! That was scary, but ultimately funny!
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Um … I’m, ah, pleased to be of assistance.
The three star thing occasionally gives a problem (for one thing, you can’t search for it in Google), but I’ve never had it crash a site before. On the other hand, it also more than occasionally makes my blog pop up to the alphabetical top of a list (though that’s not the intent), so it all balances out. 🙂
So does this mean I have to be Dave sans Stars? Or do I drop back to my other occasional screen name, Three-Star Dave?
By the way, your beta blog’s text sizes is radically different (smaller) than the sidebar size. Ditto on the Innocents page. Like, “unreadably” different. Both in FF and IE.
I’ll be curious to see, btw, how your comment spam protection works out for you in WP. Honestly, not having any problem at all these days on my main blog (because of TypePad), and even on the blogs I have without it, the TinyTuring captcha is filtering out nearly everything.
Trackback spam is another matter, but that’s just a matter of principle.
And, also a btw, your separate-page CAPTCHA isn’t (in FF at least) returning back to the comment page (or anyplace else).
But that’s why it’s considered beta, right? 🙂
Thanks muchly!! I’ve been considering increasing the post text size, since it’s not that easy to read for me on either blog also. David just checked another resolution and agrees “OMG yes,” so I’ll change the font-size to medium on both ASAP.
You’ll always be ***Dave to me, but for purposes of the automagic linkage, your site will have to be DDtB.
I’m looking forward to Gravatar.com to come back all the way so that I can update my “default” gravatar there, though.
Ah. I understand now.
And, yes, the text size now looks much better. And the Gravatars coming back will be nice.
The “This blog is protected by” link shows up as solid gray down below, unless I mouse-over it.
“Scary, but ultimately funny.” Maybe that should become a new tagline for me.
Nah. 🙂
Hmmm … I’ve never actually seen the catchpa. I’m not even sure how to force it to be used. Maybe if I turn off scripting.
Looks like the catchpa plug-in for SpamKarma is the problem … I’ll have to contact the author.
It could also be due to a database problem … since SpamKarma couldn’t find a particular table, it thought Dave’s comments were spam. It should be fixed now. If the Catchpa continues to be a problem, it can be disabled.
The “protected by” bar keeps disappearing and reappearing, because David doesn’t like it and I do. Heh. It’s kind of like when you get into an “on! off!” war with light switches. The invisibility of the author’s name is a .CSS issue that can wait, since it’s turned off.
The issue is with a database/table reset David did, he thinks. I’ll disable it for now until the database issue is resolved. Also, gravatars gone until they get their act together.
The reason for the switch: David has WordPress, and wasn’t crazy about Movable Type. Thus, my versions and anti-spam plugins were outdated (especially at Holy Moly) and the spam/trackback pr0n was a huge problem.
Hey — go where the tech support is. Nothing wrong with WP. If I weren’t as invested in MT as I am, I’d consider a change, too.