Category: Blog

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Themes

Update below, maybe WordPress isn’t so bad after all?

I broke my WordPress self-hosted/managed site earlier simply by installing a theme, the one named ‘Default’.

The hosts’s AI troubleshooter failed miserably to make any form of difference when I started it.

To fix it ‘manually’ I first attempted to follow the help page linked to in the error message – go into myPHP and deactivate all the plugins.

Nope.

So then I searched for help directly related to WordPress themes and found the way to fix it is to delete the offending theme folder and rename an existing folder to the offending one.

Success, and I felt lucky I knew which theme was active.

And even more luckily everything is back up again.

My hosting plan includes only weekly automatic backups so yes, I just started one now.

Painful isn’t it, how something so complex can be broken by something so apparently simple as a site theme change.

Anyway, I just looked for similar issues with it and eventually arrived at the WordPress.org forum. The only response i found to its incompatibility with a previous version of PHP was the original poster replying to their own post to make a technical change within the theme file definition.

Pointless reporting it if there’s nowhere to report it, so I’ve given up and I’m sticking with ‘Simple Grey’.

Update: While attempting to fix my site I was sent an email from WordPress, “@bazbt3 🏡 Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue”. I was busy so didn’t notice it. The email described the fault and contained a special link to bypass the dashboard I couldn’t access – to enter a “special recovery mode”. Maybe now I know this is a thing, the next time the site breaks I’ll be more patient?

Micro.blog initial issues

I’ve had a few fairly fundamental issues since setting up my custom domain on Micro.blog. Though my username is discoverable on Mastodon (Appdot.net) and the blog works at bt3.com with all links looking good, quite a few are concerning me.

I’ve asked for help via help@micro.blog, when they can spare the time, and I’ve posted this here not to whinge about it but so I remember how things started before I start messing about with CSS, styling my blog. 😱

Ok, the list:

  • Posts no longer automatically appear in my Micro.blog timeline.
  • Neither blog posts nor RSS feeds automatically crosspost to Mastodon, I have either to crosspost from ‘Pages’ or refresh feeds manually on the ‘Sources/Feeds’ page.
  • The comments box under posts is completely absent.
  • None of the comments made by me and others on Micro.blog or Mastodon before or after I set up the domain are visibly linked below the posts. They’re in the timeline though.
  • My custom 404 page does not display when I test by creating a non-existent URL. It’s the same for both the 404.html and the page at layouts/404.html – in a custom theme based under ‘Marfa’ or others, and edited wholly from the ‘Design’ page. Here’s the design I’ve used on both: https://bt3.com/404.html/ (a work in progress).

I’ve checked through the Help pages too, and this isn’t unusual.

Basic security

One of the basic requirements of me using the free ‘IP2Location’ WordPress plugin for my blog is that its authors ask for attribution, which is fair. So here it is:

I just installed and configured the country blocking plugin from https://www.ip2location.com. I found it after a quick web search led me to this page: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/wordpress-plugin-to-block-countries.

The setup procedure is pretty simple: install it from the WordPress dashboard, sign up for a free account at IP2Location to install the database and stuff, and setup the block rules for countries or IP addresses.

An AI-generated monochrome image of a 1980s home computer on fire. Now if one owned such a beast of a computer it's likely one was very serious indeed about computing. I was. One PC had a 'Matrox Millennium' graphics card with an unimaginably vast 4 megabytes of video RAM.

(I didn’t want to pay Wordfence to extend their so-far excellent monitoring and blocking service, at least not yet).

Oops, I did it again

Randolph, so long and thanks for all the fish your patience hosting my site & email over the years.

This is my blog, at a new host. Replacement pictures to come later.

Link to 2018 post “Killed“.