The Culprit
filed in General, Nerdy on Jan.31, 2005
The reason for the blog downtime? A broken Wordpress plugin, the acronym replacer — the thingy that adds the cool mouseover tooltips to acronyms like HTML.
What’s that you say? You want to know what was “wrong” with it? Well, ok… are you sitting down?
An extra space had mysteriously appeared at the very end of the wp-acronyms.php plugin file. So the last line was “?> ” instead of “?>”.
I am Jack’s raging bile duct.
January 31st, 2005 on 5:53:55 pm
Glad to see you back!
Sucks about that stupid typo though, how did you go about nailing that little guy down?
February 1st, 2005 on 8:29:02 am
Well… I found some posts on the wordpress support pages about people having the same symptom I was (login process returning a blank page, still not being logged in), and one of the guys fixed it by manually removing all of his plugins, re-adding them one at a time until he pinned down the one that was breaking. I did the same thing until I identified the acronym plugin as the cause, then started looking for support on problems with *it*. On the website for that plugin, I found some people posting about various install problems, including the extra spaces problem (sometimes at the top of the file, sometimes at the end). After that it was just a simple check of the file in FlashFXP’s editor :) All told: nearly 3 hours spent. Yippee.
Next task: stopping trackback spam. Will wonders never cease…