Debugging

There’s a reason my posts have been sparse lately – I’ve been having real problems with my website. I haven’t had what all the experts refer to as ‘the white screen of death’ (thank God, that sounds dreadful), but conducting updates has been difficult, and I’ve been receiving a lot more pornographic spam messages than usual (seriously, you’d have to be quite the gymnast to accomplish some of the things that have been suggested in these emails).

In the past, I’ve found Google & YouTube the best ways to tackle something I didn’t know. This was a tactic I employed all the time at work – a co-worker would phone and ask me how to do something in Excel or PowerPoint, and if I didn’t know, I’d just Google it, then tell them the steps. One colleague in Oshawa used to tell everyone we worked with “Elaine is such a whiz at Excel; she’s amazing.” Fooled ya. Did the same during lockdown: my friends at CFUW were most impressed with my knowledge, but really it was just a regurgitation of Wikihow, or Zoom Support, or something (don’t tell them).

But when I finally found instructions on how to Fix Plugin Updates in WordPress on YouTube – OMG, the solution was worse than the problem. (Kinda like chemo – you want to get rid of the cancer, but would prefer not to throw up every day. Wow – weird sidebar there.)

I watched an excellent video, and based on the tutor’s instructions, did a lengthy back-up of my site, only to have him say five minutes later in the tutorial, “But before you do a back-up, you may want to try this easy fix.” Grrrrr. Turns out, the easy fix, when I did try it, didn’t help, so in the end the back-up was still necessary. Then he suggested that in all likelihood I would have to go in behind the site to the code and debug it. The last time I debugged computer code was 1982. You know, back when Reagan was president. And back then we didn’t use any of the following words: Unix/Linus/OSX, rendered Html, Javascript, or PHP. I was more than a tad intimidated, so clearly the only thing to do was procrastinate. Obvs. Hence the lack of posts in March.

Finally I sat back down at the computer, did some more digging, and found another suggestion for repairing plugin updates. Remove each plugin, re-install it, and try an update. That will show which plugin could be the problem. (Although what to do after you’ve found the problem, who knows?) So away I went.

This was a hugely lengthy process, as each time I un-installed and re-installed a plugin, my site would crash for 20 minutes, then I could go back in and try the next one. As I have nine or ten plugins, this took forever. But perseverance paid off; I found the culprit; determined that it was no longer a necessary plugin to my site; and deleted it.

Problem solved, website working, glow of self-satisfaction abounds.