Rhapsodies

Well all in all this was a very interesting day for me. It actually started earlier this week with my WordPress dashboard beginning to show signs of… personality especially in the area of creating and editing posts. For the most part I figured out the way around it and so had chalked it up to another nuisance I would have to put up with from here on in.

It became a genuine problem for real after I had what wasn’t so much a eureka moment as it was a “you idiot why didn’t you think of this years ago” moment. For a long time one of my on going “knitting projects” (That is to say something mechanical, uncreative and tedious to do when the muse is taking a day off) has been adding keywords and transcripts to strips in the archives to help make them more visible for search engines. My not so eureka moment was the sudden thought during a WordPress users group that went as such: “Why don’t you put keywords in the current strips?”

After getting over the embarrassment of not thinking of it sooner. I couldn’t get home fast enough to do it. So far it seems to have worked. While it’s still too soon to tell the last two days normally two of my lowest traffic days are giving me numbers that have surpassed my peak times.

Anyway as soon as I realized this I added keywords to the rest of this months material. And once I’d finished I said to myself why stop there put the transcripts in too! Regrettably that brought up the problems I’d mentioned before. Once I was editing full posts (I hadn’t noticed when I had put in the keywords since I was able to do that in quick edit) every time I tried to publish any changes it gives me the white screen and when I go back to the page nothing has been saved. I’ve had the white screen before when uploading but at least there, despite the nuisance factor, everything was saved. I was be able to create new posts after a fashion but all that was saved was the post’s title,  it’s content and nothing else.  Keywords and publishing dates were ignored and  only saved the post as  a “draft” or “pending review” those changes could only done in quick edits which didn’t help with putting in anything big.  At this point I wasn’t sure if this problem was WordPress or the Theme I reinstalled both with no luck. It also occurred that if it was the Comicpress theme this might be the perfect opportunity to try the new Easel theme. This also didn’t work in fact the white screen of death blanked out everything until I deleted the plugins associated with it.

At this point I was getting frustrated thinking if I hadn’t broken my page it would be dead in a week since I couldn’t fix anything. I spent the next hour reading what I could , posting questions and tentatively tweaking what I could with extremely mixed results. (The worst of which was accidentally moving the admin folder into the content folder which was briefly worse than the white screen of death.) But I finally fixed it by deleting and deactivating a handful of unused plugins.

It’s amazing how much you can learn by reverse engineering your own stupidity.