Chris_K

Does https://wwww.striking-photography.com/wp-admin work?

Yup, that won’t move anything. See Changing_The_Site_URL to fix things.

If you want to move the site, have a look at Moving_WordPress.

I just spent a few minutes randomly clicking around your site. Didn’t see any problems.

Are you able to make the problem happen repeatably? Are there certain links that must be clicked?

Try adding /wp-admin to your blog’s URL. That should either get you a login page (if necessary) or to the dashboard.

Could you give a link to your site? This one might be easier for folks to offer ideas if they can see the issue for themselves.

I recommend looking for other means of fighting spam. Forcing folks to register is a wonderful way to chase away potential comments (just imho, of course).

You’ll want to contact whomever run ebrainwaves.net. We just supply software, we don’t manage the sites running it.

If you didn’t back it up I’m afraid nobody here can help you. www.ads-software.com based sites are self-hosted — nobody here has any access to your data, I’m afraid.

You mention “they” did an upgrade — who’s “they?” That must be someone you’ve given access to your blog? You might visit with them and ensure that they properly back things up in the future. You might also consider installing a db backup plugin like https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ to make that easier.

I’ve never tried it, but you might check out this one: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-admin-bar/

simplepie is an option if you don’t want to just use an pre-existing plugin I suppose.

As for the question about category, by default every category has a feed. Just use http://blogname.com/category/categoryName/feed for the RSS feed to it.

Nope. Do that as normal. That just tells WordPress where to find the database, that doesn’t effect/impact people browsing to your blog.

No directories need to change. Just pay attention during the install to what you specify for URL values and be sure you don’t use https://localhost anywhere — instead of localhost, use the server’s DNS name.

I would suggest not trying to pull posts directly from the other blog’s database. That way lies madness…

Instead, do what you’d do if the sites weren’t using the same db or server: RSS Syndication. There are several syndication plugins that you can look into that can be configured to pull posts from the feed of another blog. (Feedwordpress is one I used years ago but I’m not sure if it is current or not)

Yes, the connection specified in your wp-config.php file for the database can be localhost.

Perhaps it is your browser?

If using Firefox, try going to View -> Zoom -> Reset from the menu.
In IE8, that’s View -> Zoom -> 100%

You’ll be happy to know that same plugin is available for your self-hosted WordPress as well. You can find it here:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/stats/

Side note: You find plugins right here on the site at https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/ Right now, the plugin you’re after is featured right there on the front page ??