Problem was something in the coding inside the ambatch rss feed for the sponsor links.

Solution (temporary solution) was to pull the feed. It was killing the site. Would not let WordPress render the rest of the page.

Pulling the feed means the site is commercially crippled temporarily. Will remedy that soon. But am at work on another, more pressing, income project at the moment.

I’ve had repeated problems with the html within the ambatch feed failing to validate. So this may just convince me it is time to replace the feed altogether.

–kwc

How frustrating.

The sidebars are missing from Mind Body Spirit Journal. They were there yesterday. I didn’t touch the site yesterday. Gone today. Something with Wordpress. How it broke, beats me.

I went into themes and got the message that the theme is broken. It says “template missing.”

But I don’t see any missing template. And have no idea how a template could go missing. Index.php is right there. Style.css is right there. I see no changes to either. No idea what is up.

So… site is down again.

Much as I love WordPress, I don’t love it sort of spontaneously combusting on me over and over. Wish there was a “one-button checkup” built into it. Or a “one-button restore” that would quickly troubleshoot it, and then repair any problems it finds by restoring from the last daily backup.

But alas…

And I can’t make time right now to spend hours troubleshooting. So it will sit as is, broken for awhile while I move a more pressing project forward.

P.S. If you happen to be a WordPress whiz and recognize the problem, please hit the “comment” button and tell me.

By swapping one file at a time and testing, I discovered that my ’single.php’ file was corrupted.

It no longer is.

Other problems may exist that you can tell me about or that I will discover, but for now it seems like the site is working again, just like it is supposed to. And that is good.

I am going to go over the “corrupted” and the “new” versions of the single.php file, line by line, and see if I can figure out what went wrong where and why and when. If I am able to discover that, then I am less likely to create the same problem again. And if I do, I will know how to fix it right away.

– kwc

This site will be up and down beginning at about 5 p.m. (Mountain Time) Sunday, February 4.

Not sure how long I’ll be working on it.

Still (after almost a month) have not figured out what coding is fouled and causing the “comments” to disappear and the function not to work any more when you try to leave a comment. Am going to try some radical rebuilding.

While doing that (live) the site will look very weird at times, will be broken at times, will not come up at all at times.

If I can’t get the comments function working properly within about another 30 hours of troubleshooting and reworking, I am going to scrap the current site design altogether and go with a simple, out-of-the-box WordPress theme, lightly customized.

If you’re considering using WordPress for your site, stick with the simple, out of the box version.

Customize your header graphic so it looks nice. Customize your background colors.

Pick the options you want to display from the basic menu offered.

Don’t do a ton of extracurricular customizing…unless you are extremely wonky and will enjoy pretty much completely troubleshooting and reworking the coding in various files in your installation every few months. I speak from first-hand experience.

Here are reasons why it pays to stick with plain-jane vanilla: (more…)

Am temporarily stymied in my effort to troubleshoot the currently non-functioning “comments” feature on this site because the server my “unlimited account” resides on at HostNewWay.com reached 100% capacity late this evening and I’m unable to ftp files until the host clears some additional space. Waiting for the host to resolve this. Then will get back to trying to find and fix the source of this perplexing problem.

I was puzzled that no one had commented on any posts in recent months but it wasn’t until Barbra Sundquist notified me a few days back that the comments function wasn’t working on this site that I understood why.

— kwc

Am attempting to determine why the “comments” function is misbehaving. Am going to do some quick experimenting which will completely discombobulate the appearance of this site for a few moments if you’re happening to visit while I’m troubleshooting…

UPDATE: Many, many hours later. It is seeming to me that the comments function may have disappeared when I upgraded WordPress from 2.0 to 2.02 in late summer or early fall.

The newer version may have some imcompatibility with my design (known as a “theme” in WordPress speak). I haven’t found where the possible imncompatibility lies but have proven that the problem is not with WordPress itself. ‘Comments’ works and all the old comments are there when I switch to Wordpress’s highly functional but not so pretty default “Kubrick” theme. Going to continue slogging away at this.

It is also possible that I corrupted some code somewhere while validating the site in October.

TUESDAY UPDATE: About 8 hours into this I’m as puzzled as I was at the start. Haven’t located the source of the problem. I have a request in at the WordPress support forum and am hoping someone there may spot what it is I need to fix. So far no takers.

Wow. The site is working again in both IE and Firefox. And the code is validated.

Next on the agenda (after I completely back-up the newly fixed and validated files) is to do some more design work. Some neatening. Some simplifying.

- Going to cull down the “Sections” display to less than a dozen key categories.

- Going to replace the Google Adsense ads with targeted affiliate network ads and my own offerings as I roll them out. Going to experiment with ad placement, as well.

Completely dropping Google Adsense as a revenue model since it is only paying a few cents per click on website-served ads. That is the result of a Google policy change made last November. Hopefully it will kill all those spam “scraper” sites that are clogging the search engines. But it also makes it pretty pointless from a business sense for legitimate sites to run Google ads.

- May widen the sidebar columns a bit (and narrow the main content column to compensate) so the sider columns are more content friendly.

All underway and changes should be visible within a week or two.

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Next couple weeks I’m going to be focusing on commercializing Mind Body Spirit Journal, which is long overdue. Believe I’ve got enough editorial categories started to give me something to work with.

This site really doesn’t work until it begins offering useful self-help products and opportunities that readers are eager to hear about and invest in. And until it begins drawing folks because it delivers really useful and valuable offerings. When the site is clearly a vibrant marketplace as well as an inside information source and community, it will instantly command the kind of respect I expect it to grow into and deserve. And I’ll be able to easily draw big names from the greater world of Mind Body Spirit for interviews and online workshops and meetups and other cool (more…)