18-11-13 Tuesday - Coming Back to Blogger

Well, I tried the sunlit uplands of a WordPress blog hosted by GoDaddy, but it turned out to be neither elevated nor sunlit.

I looked at what I was spending in order to maintain my domain ownership, and my quarterly Wordpress hosting costs, and then compared that against the vague ramblings I was / am publishing, and it didn’t quite add up.

To be frank, this is an exercise in vanity. No-one cares about it, least of all me, but I shall carry on regardless because that’s what I do.

Really this is just a note to myself; a record of what I was (maybe) thinking at the time. I’ve already surprised myself by looking back at how even-handed I was pre-Brexit whether to vote Remain or Leave, when it’s quite clear that Remain is and was the sensible option, and there may be other things that I can look back on and surprise myself.

What made me look at my costs, and the benefits? It was an email I received from GoDaddy, advising me that I had possible malware on my blog. When I looked at the files they referenced, they were all WordPress files. when I rang them to advise that I hadn’t installed any custom files, they responded that these files might cause an issue, but they could provide some security for about £80 per year. I realised then that my vague meanderings weren’t worth what I was paying to GoDaddy. I’ve been paying £6 per month in quarterly instalments for a basic managed WordPress account, and then I paid nearly £80 to own the .com domain for 5 years and £60 for the .co.uk domain. £140 for five years of vanity publishing, and (£18*4*5=) £360 for the WP hosting just doesn’t add up, in my view. I’m happy navigating the backwaters of the blogosphere, hoping to add a note of common sense here or there.

It took me a while to work out how to get back to viewing my blog on Blogger, I had replaced the theme with the Blogger to WordPress plug-in code, and so I set a new theme and voila! My blog reappeared almost like magic. I will take a few days, I think, to mess around with the settings and the look of the blog and get it the way I like it.

I shall continue to plug away on Blogger.com and be happy in chuntering away to myself here. I’ll update my GoDaddy hosted website (thatrobthorley.com) as long as I can, by copying and pasting, but really the blog of record will be this one, https://robthorley.blogspot.com/.

TTFN.  

18-07-25 Wednesday - The Wordpress White Screen of Death

I tried to access my blog on Saturday, but encountered a white / blank screen. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, I was considering writing something but I didn’t have anything concrete in mind. Then on Monday I tried again, while I was at work, and I got the same result. Hmm, that was a bit odd. I might not have worried about it much, except that I had just paid GoDaddy for five years of blog hosting, which was a big deal for me. So I called them. I spoke to a very polite & courteous chap who was clearly based in the U.S., and he advised that probably my plug-ins were causing an issue. There were two ways to address this; I could either SFTP into my account and try to fix it myself, or I could pay another healthy £37 to get premium support, where an expert would fix my issues for me.  

It goes without saying that I chose the DIY option. I googled a few things and then went into full-on problem solver mode. I downloaded an SFTP client, FileZilla, and accessed my account without issue. There are some troubleshooting guides on the net, so I followed those; I disabled all my plug-ins and then my themes, but unfortunately neither of those steps resolved the issue. I was logged into my WordPress account on my chromebook, so I logged out to see if that was the issue. It wasn’t. And that meant that I couldn’t log into my account at all, which was a blow. I repeated a few of the steps to see if that would change anything, and I was getting more and more desperate. I renamed my .htaccess file, and looked in my config file to check if debugging was enabled. Debugging wasn’t enabled, so I tried to enable it but I think I buggered it up: the config file didn’t look the same as it did when I first looked into it. And the message had changed – I was now getting a 500 error message when I tried to access the wp-admin page.  

I was considering giving up, and potentially re-installing WordPress from scratch, but reading through it, it seemed a bit more complicated than I wanted to try. Maybe some time in the future, eh? So as a last resort I started clicking around my GoDaddy account pages, and I spotted that there were back-ups. Back-ups? I didn’t know about those. The polite GoDaddy rep never mentioned back-ups. And I knew that my last blogpost that seemed to work was on or about the 4th July, so if I could go back to before then, I might be in luck. If it didn’t work in totality, hopefully my config file might at least be repaired.  

I hit the “restore back-up” button. Then I closed out of Chrome, to refresh the cookies / cache. I took a deep breath and fired up Chrome again, and tried to log into my wp-admin page. The log-in option was there and I was able to access my account, finally. After about two and a half hours of faffing around with SFTP, it turned out that I could have solved the issue in a couple of clicks in the GoDaddy admin pages. So that was a wasted evening, more or less. And then, it was time for bed.  

TTFN.