Devblog

After finally getting all the logins fixed as mentioned in the previous post, it turned out that now two of my four blogs would not allow us to post to them (ironically this one that I posted to saying I’d fixed everything did!). Whenever we clicked on Save or Publish all that would happen is that we’d get dumped to the homepage. It would however save a copy in the Drafts folder. Sensing that this was a PHP issue and not a MySQL issue, and that there may be weeks of tinkering and fixing in my future, I decided that a Wordpress upgrade might be the best way to fix it.

I went and got the latest Wordpress 2.8 and uploaded the files to my server in the folder for the first blog. I ran the upgrade script and everything seemed fine. I was greated with the new styled login page and then got to the dashboard without a hickup. I then found my post in the Drafts folder, hit publish and it informed me that it had been published – nice!

However, when I went to the site to view the post, all I got was the Blank Screen of Death as it’s known. I bit of tinkering showed me that the PHP files were working fine – it just didn’t want to output anything. After a bit of playing around in the admin bit I finally clicked on the Themes and was presented with a message saying my theme was broken.

I loaded up the default theme and now everything works fine! Now I can just tinker with the new version and then find a theme that isn’t so boring…

[Note: I've since changed the theme so no offence to the person who designed this one]

We tried to logon to some of our Wordpress blogs yesterday and even though we hadn’t changed anything at all, whenever we logged in it just sent us back to the login page with no error messages at all. After some checking I was pretty sure that none of the passwords or anything had been changed.

Much Googling later seemed to suggest that people were having the same problem after an upgrade to 2.6 but we were still on 2.1. There were suggestions that the problem could be caused by a plugin incompatability so I thought I’d try disabling them to see if it helped. Since I couldn’t login all I did was FTP to my server, browse to the plugin directory and rename the entire thing to plugins2.

This let me login without a problem so I recreated the plugins folder and copied them back one at a time to see which ones weren’t working. I repeated this for them all and now everything is fine

I’ve just been given an old laptop to re-install by the Boss – you know, to make it faster for 10 minutes until Windows Update has made it as slow as it always was, and in the process of installing Windows came across one of the most stupid ideas that laptop makers have come up with yet.

Putting the Product Key on a sticker on the BOTTOM of the laptop

So, pick it up, read a block of the key, put it down, forgot the 5 digits, pick it up…. die of old age!

Only 35 years left till retirement….