The Blog is Back

Well, the problems with the blog have been solved. Nothing is ever as easy as it’s supposed to be.

Last night I did a routine upgrade to my WordPress blog software. It’s a simple procedure where I download the new files, delete the old from my website and upload the new ones to replace them. You have to be careful not to delete the files containing your uploaded posts, images and settings, or your customized theme if you have one. I’ve done it a half dozen times at least since I started this blog. This was supposed to be a simple upgrade that just patched some security holes. Riiiiiight….

Right after I did it, my plug-ins and my image upload functions were not working. That’s never happened before. Fortunately WordPress has a support forum where questions get answered and problems get solved with a minimum of fuss. All you have to do is endure a few snide remarks from a bunch of web geeks that think anyone without a thorough knowledge of PHP programming is a waste of skin. I’ve kissed a girl, so I guess I’m one up on most of them. Actually other than being a little impatient that I did not dig around for hours in cryptic support documents that may or may not have anything to do with my problem, they quickly solved the issue. So, my cheap shot about never kissing a girl is probably unwarranted. I also won’t take any cheap shots about parent’s basements or Tomb Raider “naked” cheat codes….

These programs are supposed to be designed to work for people without programming know-how. If we all needed to know how every line of code works just to install and use a program, computers would be pretty useless. That would be like having to know how every gasket, pipe and wire works in a car in order to be able to drive one. I know a bit more about how computers work than your average bear, but not enough to troubleshoot a mod_security problem, whatever that is.

The folks on the WordPress forums helped me out and things are working the right way again. The next update will be wrought with a little more fear and anxiety, however.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging….