Site update: New theme

There are always N+1 problems, where N = the number of problems you think you have.

Yesterday, I updated some WordPress plugins and the site broke:/ Some kind of CSS problem, as though a stylesheet failed to load.

I determined that the most recent update to JetPack apparently causes the problem, though exactly what the bug is I haven’t determined — all I know right now is that if I install and activate Jetpack, everything is fine, but the moment I connect my site to wordpress.com, which is necessary to make any meaningful use of Jetpack, something happens to cause the .css from my wp theme to fail to load and/or render. Update 2013/12/15: I have determined the cause of the problem to be a conflict between Jetpack and an outdated extension called Scripts Gzip, which I have since discontinued using.

In troubleshooting, I noticed that the theme I’d been using for the last year plus, Fudo, hasn’t been updated in a few years, and may not be compatible with the latest WP. Potential problem #2.

So I ditched it, and am currently running the 2013 WP theme until I figure out what I like. But actually I might like 2013 just fine. It’s typographically attractive, and I assume it should be well supported by Automattic since it’s an official theme.

But whatever the problem is that is being caused by JetPack 2.7 on my site, it seems to affect all themes (or at least all that I have tried so far) so I’m guessing WP will release an update to JetPack in short order and fix the problem. In the meantime I’ve started a dialog with their support and am attempting to work with them through the issue.

Until then, I’m running with JetPack disabled, so the features it provided will be absent until I turn it back on. Yay.

So, wp support advised me to delete the jetpack directory from my plugins, and try manually re-installing to see if that will fix the problem. Only thing is, right now I can’t, because for some reason I’m being denied when I try to delete the files. Not sure what’s going on there, but I surmise it may be due to some server migration issues that my current host has been experiencing lately. Regular readers (ha!) may have noticed considerable problems with uptime lately, and the host is working on migrating the server to new hardware in order to alleviate the issue. I’m not very aware of the details of this, but it seems to be an ongoing issue that has been getting worse in recent weeks. Problem #3.

Due to these problems with uptime, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to move the site to a more capable host. I’ve been with my current host since the site went up in late 2010, and I don’t feel like I have a right to complain about the recent problems because I’m not paying for the hosting service. But considering how google pagerank treats sites with poor uptime, I really can’t accept it, either, so it’s time for this site to move. I’m coming up on my 60,000th visitor, according to my wordpress stats, and the daily site traffic continues to grow (although thanks to the frequent downtime of late my monthly numbers have been rather flat.)

So hopefully, I’ll be updating soon from the new host, just as soon as I get files and database moved over, and working, and switch DNS over.

Stay tuned:)

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