You may have noticed some technical difficulties with the blog today. This was for reasons that most people probably don’t have the time or the inclination to read about. However, for the handful out there who want a chronology of my problems, here it is.

I got error messages a couple of times in the morning when checking the site. Other times it loaded fine. Then I got a phone message from David at about 1:45 (I was busy with my toddler at the time he called) saying that while the homepage was loading, if you clicked on any permalink page, you got an error message. I went in and this was indeed the case. I also noticed it was true for category pages. I opened a ticket with my server, Lonex, to see if the problem was on their end. They replied that an administrator was working on the problem on their end and it should be solved shortly. This was reassuring, but then another 2 hours passed and nothing had changed.

So I went into my WordPress dashboard and looked at my options page. I noticed there were two boxes: one for WordPress URL and one for Blog URL. I noticed that they were different — one was filled in “http://kmareka.com” and the other “https://kmareka.com/index.php”. I thought perhaps that was the problem — that they were not the same, so I took out the /index.php on the second box and updated. Voila — all my pages were loading, category, etc.

Then I began to worry about external links to the site and whether they had the index.php in the code for individual permalink page links. I found one, tested it and realized that these would now have error messages. I went back into my dashboard, into options, and tried to change the second category back to https://kmareka.com/index.php. When I clicked on “update” I got an error page and then when I tried to get back into my dashboard, I got an error message. Then I started getting error messages for the homepage and all permalinks.

Getting a little brain frantic, I logged into WordPress and asked for some help. A helpful person showed me how to go into my php database and change the values for the “site url” and “home” to http://kmareka.com, which should have straightened everything out, but still my theme wasn’t loading and I couldn’t get back into my dashboard for the site. I offered some wacky idea in WordPress for how to solve the problem and some kind advanced code person suggested I be quiet, do what I am told, and reply exactly to the questions I am being asked.

It occurred to me that I had to find a way to log in and fix the problem I had created on the options page, but how would I do that? Then I tried going to the login page at WordPress rather than just trying to go through my website favorites dashboard link. This got me into my dashboard page, though unformatted. Then I clicked on options, deleted the extra index.php, updated, and the site is now working again.

I still don’t know why the site was having the original problem — why it was suddenly unacceptable to WordPress that I had a disparity between these two addresses. Any techies out there who can enlighten me, please do.

Now back to our regular programming, except now it’s bedtime. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.