Today was a tough one and I don’t know why I’m going to write about it, but I think that it may be a good way to wind down from a long day. I don’t know what happened, but a small little job on the site ended up taking more than 12 hours to correct, and I’m still not sure whether it’s fixed or not.

It started this morning about 7 when I decided that before I jump onto the book to finish that up, I thought I’d play with my site. I’ve mentioned a few times that there have been a lot of problems with my site since the last hacking. After the third hacking I just didn’t really try anymore to get the site up to par with what I believe it should have been. Having said that though, it’s always in the back of my head that I needed to fix some things. So this morning as I mentioned I thought I’d go in and see if I could fix the menu on the blog page from covering the other links during dropdown. Seemed pretty easy, find the offending code and make changes. So easy that for about three hours I scoured the css files, the template files, every file that was even remotely associated with the menu I looked at.

It wasn’t long before I noticed some item that I had wanted to change and hadn’t gotten to it yet, so I thought I might as well do it now. That lead to other changes, and then I ended up breaking something. I tried everything to get back to where I was just so I could basically start again. I couldn’t fix it, so I thought I’d bypass the frontend and backend and go directly into the database to make the changes. Okay, I’ve done it a hundred times, it’s a little bit scary just because the chance of total failure is a real possibility, so it’s always my last resort. By now it’s like 1 in the afternoon, and I’ve downloaded and made my changes to the file. The only problem is I can’t upload it. I’m getting an error that is stopping the progress. I do my usual search to find how to fix it, no luck. I can program php/MYSQL with help from duckduckgo, but this fix was beyond my skills. So I tried fixing the db different ways, going through different methods that really didn’t help at all, except for giving me a shred of hope for about five minutes until they too failed. It was just enough hope to keep me from giving up.

So as I was sinking ever deeper into the web abyss, I finally gave in and decided that I should update wordpress. I get worried about updating software because of the problems that sometimes occur with compatibility. So I usually wait to upgrade until I have to, like today.The update took maybe 1 minute to complete. It was so fast that I thought that it stopped or something.

It’s about 4 and the website isn’t really broken at this point, I’ve managed to do some work-a-rounds to get it basically where it was when I started this morning. Anyway, wanna guess what happened after the update? If you’ve been playing along as I tell my story, you’ve probably realized that, yes, I broke the site with the upgrade. Not a major break, but wp was inserting extra code into all the blog links so they returned 404 pages. I dive straight back into the front and backend coding to figure out the source of the code that inserts the links is located. Since the update would only change includes, maybe db, and some pages, the fix should have been somewhat easy. It only took me until about 6 to get it fixed./s

Geez…

On a slightly good note though, after dinner I went back to work and fixed the problem with the dropdown menu, and made some cosmetic changes too. :)

So that’s my story and it happens to be my complete day too. I wouldn’t say that I had fun solving the problems with the site, but I feel good that I did solve them at the end of the day, literally at the end of the day. :)

As I’ve been spending more time working on the site, I keep noticing things that I didn’t realize were wrong or not correct, e.g., the footer in the blog. I seem to remember taking it out because there was a compatibility issue between Bootstrap and WordPress, but I don’t remember for sure. If there was a valid reason I guess I’ll find out when I go to change it. The biggest thing that I have to fix is the responsiveness. It’s the one thing that made me kind of give up on the site after the last hacking. The thought of creating an additional two designs for the different screen sizes that are mangled or missing is going to take a lot of time, both in coding and designing.