21-07-03 Saturday I - Writing

I was on a training call this week when the presenter recounted a story. It was probably one she's told a thousand times before, but it really stayed with me. It went something like this... 

I went to visit an old lady in a home and asked her carers about her, hoping that they would give me something I could use as small talk, an ice-breaker. "Well", they said, "although she's 92 she goes swimming  every day". That was a great bit of info, I thought, and I decided to use it when I met her. 

"So, I hear you go swimming every day", I said, "I hope I go swimming every day when I'm your age". 

She looked at me sternly and asked "do you go swimming every day now?" 

I was slightly taken aback, and said "no". 

"What makes you think you'll go swimming every day when you're 92 then?" she asked. 

The rest of the presentation was okay, I suppose; it was a bit corporate-y, but that scene-setting encounter stuck with me. 

I do want to keep my blog up to date with thoughts on current events and family happenings, and the tale above jolted me somewhat: how am I going to do it in future if I don't start doing it now? And I know that yes, I often write at the start of the year or at various points that I am going to update this blog more often but I think this is a real "paradigm shift" to borrow a phrase. How long it lasts is anyone's guess; this will probably be my last blogpost until September :D. 

But this might be the start of an outpouring of daily gibberish, so I'd watch out if I were you...

TTFN.

20-12-23 Wednesday Covid-19 Day 284 I - Pivot

God knows I've tried to write more frequently, but recently every time I've sat down and looked at the blank white screen of an unwritten blog entry I've experienced a moment of deep Angst. I've looked at the space to fill, and my mind has reacted with "AAARRGH", like some kind of inner primal scream.

For good or ill I'm very interested in national politics, and have been for some time. Currently I think the country is in a mess; the wrong people are in charge, and the wrong decisions are being taken. Every time I consider writing down my frustration with the whole situation, it gets away from me and I end up not writing anything. And of course there are those who express themselves much better than I ever could; Marina Hyde in the Guardian is unmissable, for one.

I'm going to have to change my approach, I think. I ought to take just one detail or moment and focus on that, expanding outward if necessary; maybe that is the way forward. Start with the personal and see if it applies to the general. There are so many moments which have gone uncaptured, and it would be nice to remedy that. Steer away from getting worked up about current affairs and focus more on personal observation or surreal silliness. It won't stop me from doomscrolling through Twitter or watching the news, but it might help me find ways to express myself in a more individual manner. 

It's a possibility. 

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.