Insomnia leads to a fixed blog
For some reason, I woke up at around 5am and have yet to get back to sleep. When I first couldn’t get to sleep, I looked for something to do and decided to try to figure out why my “recent comments” sidebar hasn’t been showing up, and maybe look at why I was seeing some other weirdness when posting lately. This lead me down a long winding path:
- I realized wordpress was out of date, so I updated it.
- I changed some permission settings so I could update all of my plugins (including the recent-comments plugin).
- I realized that the new version of the recent-comments plugin supported widgets, but my theme did not. I researched how to do this, and updated my theme to support widgets.
- I didn’t like how the widgets fit into my stylesheet, so I hacked up my style sheet to make it look the way I wanted.
- I tweaked and tuned a bunch of things in the side panel.
- Updated my CC license
- Cleaned up some code
- Reordered items
- Realized that my adsense account is messed up (Since I don’t actually make money with it, i never check these things)
- I realized that there is a built-in recent comments widget, so I activated that and deactivated the plugin – and then realized that comments still weren’t showing.
- There was some other strange stuff (links not appearing in the side panel either, etc) that I attributed to the new widget layout.
- I began realizing that comments wouldn’t show in my Admin panel either – though the counts for the comments did appear, and the comments still showed up on the pages. To google!
- After finding some notes about missing indexes in the wordpress comments database table, I checked my apache logs to see what errors were being thrown (yeah, I know – this should have been step number 1 or 2). This made me realize that the comments table was flagged as crashed in mysql.
- Ran a REPAIR command on the table – and suddenly everything starts working again. Everything. That one little glitch had pooched a bunch of stuff in the system.
Oh well, it was a round-about way of doing it, but at least I am now running the newest version of wordpress (digging the new features, btw), an updated theme (I know – it looks the same as the old one, but trust me – the guts are different) and I got some things tweaked that I have been wanting to do for a while.
Anyway – the page is fixed, which is good – I’ve been wanting to start using it again for some things. Now, if I can just get back to sleep, I’ll be all set.