My WordPress 2.6 Blog is Up and Running, Finally!

Oh, yeah. Finally. After postponing reinstallation of WordPress 2.6 on my server for sentimental and not-so-sentimental reasons, I finally gave in last Saturday. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I haven’t been “down” for that long and three days is just too much for a blog to be down. Like I said, everything else is okay with it, except for the homepage that displays nothing more than a “blank screen of death” as touted by one blogger who had a somewhat similar problem, although not entirely similar as mine. His had a problem with the wp-config.php (an extra unassuming “empty” line in the code) which, according to him, when removed, solved his problem so miraculously as if nothing happened. Now, I wish my problem was as easy as that or as easy as another site owner’s problem with a faulty index.php script that needed to be renamed to .htm. Both problems characterized an unaccessible admin/login screen. Mine was entirely different because I can login, write posts, preview and save. As the blog site’s blogger, owner and administrator all at the same time, I obviously knew by heart quite a few permalinks to posts and pages (for the uninitiated, permalinks are permanent URL’s of your posts). So anyway, I tested these permalinks and they worked perfectly fine. Now, that would have sounded great if only for the fact that (1)those accessing ADayInTheLifeOfRJ.com through direct URL would not see anything, and that (2)they wouldn’t have the slightest hint of my permalinks. Those accessing through Google search, however will still land on my site.

I tried messing with the scripts and all that boring research but I guess, I’m too old and impatient for that right now, specially lurking and going over a loooooong thread in the WordPress forums. So, I did the dreaded and inevitable — I reinstalled WordPress on my server. That’s a clean install. Start over. Start from scratch (almost, since I had an xml file of the posts backup). My webhost offers WordPress 2.3.3. That means, an upgrade is still needed. So I decided to install, upgrade, import posts, uploaded themes and plugins, added widgets. And voila! Blog is back! Just like that. I make it appear so easy but I tell you, it takes work, a lot of patience, dedication and pure love of blogging to endure such a thing. Anyway, I’m happy that all is well now. Although, more work is left to be done ( I have to manually repair broken links since my permalink structure was set to default), it should be easier than staring at a “blank screen of death”. Oh well, another Day In The Life Of RJ.