I indulged my inner geek last night and made some fairly extensive changes under the hood to the blog. If I did it right — always a dubious proposition — then no changes should be visible to the reader whatsoever, except perhaps that the blog will load a bit quicker.
So please do let me know in the comments if anything seems weirder — or less weird — than usual. Or even if they seem the same.
The blog was down much of the day while I was busy in Baltimore and Washington (how does it know to die whenever, and almost only whenever, I’m out of town?). Here, according to support, is the cause:
The apache service did not like the initial IPv6 assigned to the domain. I changed out the IP and reset the apache service for the domain and I can now view the domain.
I don’t actually understand how this is possible, but if this is the straight dope, it suggests IPv6 adoption is going to be much rockier than I ever imagined.
Update: I asked for further and better particulars, and got this:
The tech who helped you is not in the office. Therefor I cannot give you an definitive answer. However, I had a similar issue on another machine. It appeared to be a kernel bug. The IP was visible to the VPS guest, but could not use. It appache cannot listen on an IP, it will not start. The best course of action was to simply renumber the IP. Hopefully this gives you more insight. If you have any additional questions, please let us know.
No idea why, but the widget is working right now, so I’ve restored it to the right column. I like the colors.
The WP Google Weather Widget I’ve had in the sidebar decided for no apparent reason today to go nuts.
Instead of a pretty picture, I got:
Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: in {directorypath}/plugins/wp-google-weather/wp-google-weather.php on line 162
The error is highly reproducible, so it looks like it may be toast, although I can’t figure out what might have changed on my end to cause this. Nor it seems can others.
I’ve substituted the WP Wunderground widget, at least for the time being.
I just this moment noticed that the Herald “Best of the Blogs” column, which appears on page two of the Local section, today lists my post I Just Got Push-Polled in the Coral Gables Election as one its three recommendations.
No one mentioned this to me in person or by email, making me wonder if anyone is reading that part of the Herald….and it doesn’t seem to be online either.
Meanwhile, I have a followup post regarding Gonzalo Sanabria, who — get this — called me up on Thursday when he saw the original blog item and (very nicely) asked to meet me to discuss it. We had coffee this morning. I hope to post an account of it this evening or at latest tomorrow, but I still have some work preparing for class to do first.
I upgraded discourse.net to WordPress 3.1 and while my front page is fine, and my data is fine, most individual blog posts are no longer visible but come up as not-found.
I haven’t lost any data — I can see the posts them in the post dialogs. But no one else can see them.
It seems to be related to the permalinks: I use custom permalinks of the form
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
If I switch to standard permalinks then all is well, but all my links would be broken, both internally and externally.
It’s not any plugins – turning them all off didn’t solve it.
I tried deactivating my child theme (I use a modified Twenty Ten theme); that did not solve the problem.
I tried installing the Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack, and this didn’t fix it. [Update: which is hardly surprising, reading the fine print of that plugin, since I’m on a straight Debian box]
Other links, like the “older posts” link at the bottom of the front page, are broken too….
Can anyone give me some advice, please?
UPDATE (5:35pm): OK, the major weirdnesses are fixed, I hope, although I think there are still some subtle problems here and there. It seems I needed to have some plugins on, and some off, not all on or all off.
In the process of fixing things, though, I also lost the customization I had for some archive pages, that gave full-text of posts instead of little summaries without links. I’ll have to try to remember how I did that….
Jotwell Blenderlaw