Wordpress – Absoblogginlutely!

Critical error with WordPress – just reinstall again

By Andy on Monday, April 3, 2023

I’ve been getting several occurrences of Critical error when attempting to access WordPress on this site and I’m not 100% sure exactly what is causing the issue – I suspect it’s the automatic upgrade breaking things but doing an in-place upgrade to WordPress after the issue occurs seems to fix the issue each time.

Initially I thought it was a recent upgrade to PHP on my host and several old plugins using invalid php code that was causing the site to fail, however renaming the plugins and the themes folder to .old did not fix the issue.

After downloading the latest version of WordPress and extracting the files over the top of the original install the site then became available. This then enabled me to login, rename the theme directory, rename plugins and everything continued to work.

This did mean it was a good opportunity to spring clean the site and remove some old plugins that were no longer required.

I’ve rearranged the sidebar, removed an odd paragraph that was displaying an empty box and removed duplicate category and tag links. I’m still looking for a new blog layout theme – a lot of the WordPress themes seem to be focused on either a 1-3 page product site or box sites that consist of as many short excerpt posts as possible on the main page.

I really don’t like the excerpt page option – as most of the time I’m wanting to read everything in the article that someone has written. It’s especially annoying in RSS readers when you then have to click through to the site to read the rest of the content and that typically results in an unsubscribe from me.

I’m hoping some of this will fix the site from being dropped by Bing Search engine – something I’ve been struggling with for a couple of months and so far the support team have been completely useless in answering why the site has been removed from the index.

Wordpress

Excuse the mess – I’m retheming the website.

By Andy on Thursday, August 24, 2017

I realized that my last post with multiple pictures in it was not displaying well on screens as the theme I was using was not a responsive theme and resizing to fit the screen display.

I have therefore switched to the WordPress 2017 theme as it looks pretty decent and the images and layout display as intended without nasty overlays over the top of the right hand navigation bars. Having said that, this theme no longer has right hand navigation bars which I’m not very happy with and the huge header image in a very low resolution looks pretty bad. Hopefully they will be back soon and the image logo rectified but we have a pretty hectic weekend or two planned.

I have quite a few from various activities I have been involved in this year so there may well be some new images making a rotation in the header.

Please let me know what you think of this – to me the static image gives a more consistent branding look as opposed to a website that looks different every time you visit.

I can’t remember the last time I changed the look and feel of the site – the previous theme was a mix of a published theme I had plus some code taken from my previous Movabletype installation adapted to work in WordPress – yes it has been that long!

If you have recommendations of (non premium) themes that look decent, are responsive and suitable for a blog format then I have an open ear for the suggestions.

Wordpress

WordPress fixed.

By Andy on Friday, August 18, 2017

Well that was embarrassing – this website has been down for a while. It looks like some kind of WordPress upgrade blew the site up – the site was last updated 7/30 so I know it was fine then but it looks like some plugins were updated on 8/2 so probably around that point in time, but looking at my visit stats it looks like it actually went down on the 3rd/4th August.

When I went to the site this evening I got an ugly message of “Fatal error: Class ‘WP_Widget_Custom_HTML’ not found in /pathtomywordpresslocation/wp-includes/class-wp-widget-factory.php on line 106″

From what I can tell, this is the one of the core files from WordPress so is not a file that typically gets changed.

The typical advice for this sort of error is to deactive the plugins installed – either through the database or by renaming the plugins directory in the wp-content directory. I found that this didn’t actually work and I had to run a manual update for WordPress as per the instructions at https://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress#Manual_Update

Note that when removing the plugins, wp-includes and wp-admin directory you may want to rename them rather than delete – this way you always have a copy to refer back to. I found that my theme actually required some files from the plugin directory so although the admin site was available, the main site was not available until after I copied the plugins back.

Even more interestingly, after installing WordPress manually and logging into the admin interface I still get “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete – please attempt the update again now” This is easily fixed by deleting the .maintenance file in the main wordpress directory and then refreshing the admin page.

Phew!

I have now updated my monitor script to check for the existence of text in the page as opposed to just checking that the web page is up and running.

Wordpress Work

WordPress 4.6 is out now.

By Andy on Tuesday, August 16, 2016

I’ve spent most of the day fighting a WordPress install at work as it has been slow and sending various out of memory issues on a 16GB of memory VPS – so should really have enough memory to run a WordPress site. Therefore it was quite a surprise to see that 4.6 was released today for me to spend yet more time in WordPress today.

However, on this personal site, the upgrade went through smoothly with no issues (as far as I know).

Wordpress

Page Not Found when publishing a WordPress post

By Andy on Monday, July 5, 2010

Since updating to WordPress 3.0, every time I create a new post, I get an error messaging saying Page Not Found but the post is created successfully and appears in the right hand side of the screen under the recent posts. From what I can see in the forums, most people who get this message don’t get the post generated either. For me the error message shows up but the page has been created successfully.

This post will be updated as I work through the solutions – Troubleshooting consists of disabling plugins and then re-enabling them one at a time – a very time consuming process.

Typical – now I can’t reproduce the error! Seeing as though the page does actually exist I think I’m just going to not worry about it 😉

Wordpress

WordPress 3 is now out.

By Andy on Thursday, June 17, 2010

I’ve upgraded and if you are seeing this, then the process was the normal easy, couple of clicks upgrade. So far the interface looks cleaner and I’m liking the fact that finally the updates is at the top of the main dashboard menu rather than being buried in a couple of menus and not in the obvious place. It was weird that plugin upgrades were not under the upgrade option in 2.9.2
Let me know if anything isn’t working – I’ll be upgrading the other sites in the next couple of days – it will be interesting to see what is discussed at Wordcamp/Podcamp Ohio on Saturday.

Wordpress

Podcamp or WordCamp Ohio is next Saturday (June 19th)

By Andy on Saturday, June 12, 2010

I registered for PodcampOhio 3 months ago but for some reason it was not in my calendar so it’s a good job they reminded us about it on the blog.
It will be nice to take the dellmini with me next week instead of having to lug the normal laptop around. The only annoying thing is the mouse movement and smaller keyboard so I’ll have to type slower. I’m debating on loading OneNote onto the machine (restricting me to just one OS for the day or just using Onenote WebApp(but that assumes web access is always available)

If you’re going – don’t forget to say hello.

I guess I should have got my act together and submitted a session on “securely logging into your WordPress blog at conferences without needing an SSL certificate”. The most embarrassing thing is that I worked out how to do this last year before the conference and said my instructions were coming soon!

Wordpress

When changing password on Twitter – update your plugins too

By Andy on Sunday, March 14, 2010

A while back I changed my twitter password – not realising how many other applications I would need to change…The first thing I had to do was go and change my tweetdeck installations which wasn’t too bad. However, this did mean changing it on three different machines.

This morning I posted a new blog post on IRL and realised that the post hadn’t made it to @helsbyhome on twitter. Checking in I realised I had to change my twitter plugins within wordpress too. These plugins haven’t been working for a couple of months now – oops!

For those of you are are interested, I’m using twitme and twitter updater with Tinyurl – any suggestions on alternatives or what do you use?

Blogging Wordpress

Lifestream functionality is now working properly.

By Andy on Sunday, November 8, 2009

I’ve been playing around with Lifestream over the past few months and now have it working properly. It seems that there was a clash with the plugin upgrade notifier and as that didn’t work anyway, I disabled it and now the cron jobs run successfully and update my lifestream page – that pulls together all the various updates from various internet sites and blogs that I make.

Wordpress

Removing WordPress version number from themes.

By Andy on Friday, July 24, 2009

Thanks to Digging into WordPress (a blog I’ve just started reading), it’s possible to easily remove the WordPress version from the header information on a WordPress site. This (slightly) helps security in that the version of wordpress is no longer transmitted to the web browser. It would be nice if this was a toggle switch in WordPress’s admin panel though.
To implement the change, just edit the functions.php file in the Theme and add the following line.
remove_action ('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
One thing to watch is that if you upgrade your theme this change is likely to be undone. I’ve actually created a draft post in WP where I keep my theme changes listed so that they appear in the dashboard and I have a record of what changes are made to the design.
On another theme related post, I have now enabled comments on all the posts on the blog as I had issues where posts that had the enable discussion enabled were not allowing comments to be made on them. Hopefully akismet will continue to do a good job of trapping the spam. I didn’t get any help from the WordPress Support forums so this was my workaround.