Blogging Blunders

What it takes to get the job done with weblogging is a neverending and humbling experience.

Friday through Saturday we had some ‘technical difficulties’ resulting from installing several plugins.I found out about the blank screen issue - you put in the address, and nothing. Showed. Up. Imagine having several hundred hits on your site - only to discover you’ve got a blank front page. Dooh.

I’m sure it wasn’t the plugin author’s fault; however it did surprise me. Probably something to do with file corruption on the upload or some such nonsense. Either that, or some procedure stopping partway through because of security issues.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I fixed that by removing all of the themes, and reloading them. That worked fine, except that I was having connectivity issues with my broadband provider at the same time. Of course the connection wasn’t working when I needed to upload files…

After battling through those issues the next obstacle was in tracking down all the error messages that kept popping up in the | Plugin | and | Themes | portions of the Meta Admin area. I worked on those diligently as well.

The final straw was discovering, after debugging the installation, this morning that my RSS feed was corrupted. After spending all this time just trying to stop the bleeding, I felt it was time for a complete site reload.

Lessons Learned

In Naval Aviation, any near-mishap is discussed in an open forum so others may benefit from the knowledge. If those ego-driven pilots can do it, then we should be able to confess our mistakes and explain how we correct them without too much of a fuss.

So after spending the major part of this weekend hosing my site with plugin installations gone wong, I’ve settled on a better way of doing things…

Henceforth, I’ll try plugins on a ‘beta’ - separate nonpublic site - before just installing them into my site. A subdirectory with its own WordPress install, and some content uploaded from the XML of this site. I also am thankful that I didn’t try the plugins on some of my client sites. After all, this site is my beta for my clients.

Experiment on yourself first. (Richard Marcinko, ex-SEAL)

The remedy to bad plugins in this case unfortunately required a complete reload of the site. I love XML and WordPress, because it took me only about an hour to do the reload once it was determined that was the final course to take. I wasn’t able to save the Blogroll, but that shouldn’t be too hard to replace.

I’ve come away from the whole experience quite wary of using the free plugins, however most are very useful. The plugin writers are usually very capable, and when I reached out to them I was not disappointed, having an answer back within a few hours of posting.

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