I think maybe I’m ready to peddle myself as a WordPress guru. Well, a guru in training, at any rate. The weird problems I have plowed through in the past couple years of WP blogging have been… educational.
A few days ago, I was getting “500 internal server” errors on this blog and my tattoo blog. The tattoo blog proved to be a relatively easy fix (the .htaccess file was messed up). But this one… wouldn’t fix no matter what I tried. So I called my web host’s tech support.
The helpful tech I talked with agreed that the problem was likely the .htaccess file here, too, and said he’d fix it. I thanked him, he fixed it, everything worked fine. Phew. Thought that was the end of it.
Today, trying to add this blog to TwitterFeed, I discovered that (a) in copying over the sig from my tattoo blog I had stupidly not changed the feed link and (b) the RSS link in the banner didn’t work. Fixing the sig was no problem, after I quit whapping myself on the head, but I was out of my league on the RSS link issue.
So this time my first line of approach was to post a message in the WordPress support forums, which are without a doubt THE best source for WordPress answers. Especially for off-the-wall problems like this. It seems like no matter what the problem might be, someone there has the answer that works.
Which was the case this time–within a very short time span I got help. And it turned out to be a host problem once again, not anything within WP. And thus nothing I could fix. So I called the host again.
They said they’d run some diagnostics on the site and email me the results. I have not yet gotten the email, but everything appears to be working just fine now. My blogs back themselves up automatically once a day, but I think I’d better go run another backup now.
photo credit: The Flooz
