Sorry About the Snow

No, I don’t mean the climatic conditions you may be experiencing while I endure temperatures of 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit (24C-30C) at mid-day here.

I mean the symbolic stuff that fell on the blog today.

It seems that the Jetpack plugin I use has a snow setting and that something turned it on. The story of how I turned it off is a cautionary tale of a little knowledge being dangerous. Ignore the rest if tech talk bores you.

First thing I did was look at the code being served up by the blog. And sure enough, there was a call to a “holiday-snow” module in Jetpack. I turned to Google, which on what turned out to be a careless reading told me I should see a control in the Jetpack configuration settings. So I went to the (very extensive) Jetpack control menu and looked for a snow toggle. No luck.

Worrying it might be a hack I logged into the blog’s server and confirmed that there was in fact a jetpack module of that name sitting deep inside the code dropped in by jetpack.

Since I vaguely remembered running snow on purpose some time in the past, I started to worry that maybe I had hand-coded the call to the snow module. This is a bad practice, one I abandoned long ago for the much cleaner and safer method of using child themes, but maybe it was so long ago…? But, no, all the grepping I tried found no hard-coded calls to the holiday snow routine.

So after wasting a lot of time on this, I went back to Google. There I found that Jetpack works differently on wordpress-hosted blogs (the snow toggle is where you would expect it), and on self-hosted blogs like mine. In those cases, the plugin adds a snow toggle into the Settings > General menu of WordPress, completely separate from the Jetpack > Settings menu where all of its other options reside. I think that’s sort of sneaky, and uncalled for, but if I’d read the instructions I found the first time a little more carefully, I’d have saved half an hour or more.