ChapterZero

For the past couple weeks, my WordPress installation hasn’t been able to automatically update itself via ftp. I got messages like “Error: There was an error connecting to the server, Please verify the settings are correct.” I didn’t find any useful entries in the wordpress.org forums. It turns out the problem was with the ProFTP [...]

Commenting is fixed! … and just as importantly, the old comments have been restored. The problem turned out to be, yet again, that one of WP’s database tables got corrupted. This time since it wasn’t preventing the blog from loading, I thought there couldn’t have been a table problem, but nope … so I just [...]

It looks like commenting is not going to be working anytime soon. After a weekend of searching through php code and reading relevant comment threads on the WP site, I’m still scratching my head. So I’m just going to operate the site sans comments until the next version of WP is available (probably in under [...]

I had to do this once before, only a couple months ago, and I just had to do it once again, so I figure I should record it for future use and on the off chance it may help other WP users. The suggestion WordPress gives when it finds that one of its tables is [...]

I’ve started working on a modification of the LatexRender WP plugin. My motivation is to increase the ease of certain tasks that I’ve found myself doing often, and add a little more functionality to the current plugin. Here’re a list of the changes I’m planning. Suggestions are welcome. Support logically separate classes of LaTeX content: [...]

Wow. That was not fun– I had to rediscover how to do several sysadmin type things, and the whole while I was afraid I’d cause some irrevocable error. There still seems to be a problem with accessing external websites, which was present right from the pristine file-system, so I’m stumped on that one. On the [...]

Some time soon, the site’s going wayyy down for a while – hopefully it’ll be back up by Monday, but in the worst case scenario, I plan to have it up by the following Monday. Apparently my host has not blocked port 80, and one of the tech people tried various approaches which didn’t work: [...]

In trying to figure out why Akismet suddenly broke, I isolated the part of the code that calls akismet.com, and ran that alone. The results showed that instead of contacting akismet.com, the server is trying to contact a search engine looking for akismet.com. So I logged in and tried using lynx and mozilla to pull [...]

Akismet has crapped out on me lately; consequently today alone I’ve waded through 700+ spam comments in moderation. In retaliation, I’m doing a summer cleaning of the site. I’ve upgraded WP from v2.0.1 to v2.2.1, mostly so I don’t fall so far behind that plugin compatibility is a major issue; along the way I’ve switched [...]