Category Archives: Anything Else

*That* was the problem?!

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So, I’ve been thinking that I might want to add commenting back into the CS main site. (I go back and forth on this at least once a year.) If nothing else, it will force me to get a little more fluent in theme editing, right? (Also cementing my loathing for the Kubrick theme, but that’s neither here nor there.)

So I spend a few days in bloody, rip-apart theme-land. I get a beta theme that has 90% of the look/feel I want and (theoretically) 95% of the commenting functionality I want. So I take the site off line, load it up, and poke around. And comments don’t work.

In fact, comments don’t work on the main site at all, no matter what theme I pop in. (PPF though, worked just fine.) Much hair is pulled out. WordPress is uninstalled and then re-installed. (If you saw anything funky last night, this would be why. Also, PPF has not yet been brought back online, but I’m a little lazy and I’m pretty sure no-one’s paying attention to that section but me anyway.)

Re-installing wordpress is a pain in the ass. My server has a 2MB upload limit and how big is my data archive? 2.14 MB. File is manually split into 2 pieces and imports just fine. Plugins are re-installed. The gallery is re-created. (Mostly. Still some tweaks that need to be tweaked.) Two hours and some cursing later and I still can’t send though a test comment. I begin to wonder of there’s some data corruption somewhere, or if I’m just cursed.

Trying to troubleshoot or find help in the wordpress codex/forums, BTW, sucks. I’d heard this around and about, but hadn’t yet experienced it in it’s full glory. It REALLY sucks. I was on the verge of hitting B&N tonight and hoping I could find something relevant to my actual problem, when I ran across a post for a problem similar to but not exactly the same as what I was seeing. The solution for that problem was to CHMOD the .htaccess file so that wordpress could write changes to it.

My .htaccess file was already CHMOD’ed correctly, but I had made custom changes to it over time. So (while crossing fingers and making a backup just in case) I delete the copy from the server and let wordpress generate it’s own copy. And suddenly, comments work. Hoorah.

If only I’d figured this out before I went and made all that extra work for myself.

The past is prologue?

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I’ve seen a few musings out an about that we’re heading towards another Weimar-esque go-round. (Jones is just the one that stuck in my head today.)

I can’t disagree more. (This is normal – I disagree with Jones about 80% of the time.) In Weimar Germany, minorities segregated by centuries of culture and tradition were turned into scapegoats and later murdered enmasse. Today our scapegoats are culled from the very tip-top of the social and economic pecking order. These are men and women (but mostly men) who could be charitably described as the overlords of the business world, who are now watching nervously as their (conspicuously ostentatious) homes are picketed by angry mobs (in America) and attacked with rocks (in the UK).

We’re not looking at a repeat of 1930′s Germany, we’re looking at France circa 1789. And yes, I’m, worried.