l-s-1

Anybody who thinks I wanted breakfast in bed didn’t read my posts.

Anybody who thinks I don’t want to learn or am not willing to invest some sweat didn’t read my posts. I believe I did mention how many hours I’d spent, yes, searching Google, yes, searching the forums. I’m usually able to solve my tech problems this way. WP proved the exception, which says more about WP than it does about me.

To those who recommend a managed hosting solution, some of you meant well, but you didn’t really get the sense of what I’ve been saying. It should be obvious that I want to do this myself, that I want to learn and have put a good deal of effort into it.

I just want instructions that are clear, logical, start at the beginning and skip no steps. Why do I want this? Because I don’t want to waste time learning nothing when with proper guidelines, in the same amount of time, I could be getting somewhere.

For the fellow who decided he knew enough to pronounce that I *wouldn’t* in fact write better documentation myself, well, I do it all the time – not for WP, obviously, but when people come to me for a step-by-step to solve their program problem, that’s what they get. I know, because they’re thrilled. I take the time to understand their problem, which I think your post reveals you didn’t do before replying to mine.

To those who were helpful and made thoughtful recommendations or took the time to explain something as clearly as they could, I thank you. I’ll be studying your posts. People like you make the world go round. To those who just can’t be bothered and enjoyed a chance to get off on their technical superiority…

Steve, thanks so much.

Very shortly after my previous post here, I noticed there was an upgrade to 2.7.1. I clicked on the upgrade link and it worked. After a reboot I was suddenly able to get RSS feeds to ‘take’ – mostly, not 100% of the time.

Have been meaning to get back here and post that that was the solution, at least for me.

I’ll be copying your advice above and saving it for reference.

There’s still an issue that sometimes, without warning results in this error message:
Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /home/–username–/public_html/wp-includes/rss.php on line 449
This happened yesterday with a feed that was previously working fine.

Because it displays the blog owner’s webhost username, it’s a security risk – I have no idea how many hours my webhost username was out there for the world to see.

See post on this subject here:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=2397

Regards, L

Aaaarrgggh, the silence is deafening. Where are the WordPress geeks?

Per the post below, it’s also a security risk:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=2397

I’d sure like to know, too. Check out this post about the security risk this error presents.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=2397

So many people have asked about this error, and no one has provided an answer.

Figaro –

What, you don’t like hyperbole? ??

Actually, I didn’t think I was exaggerating. This is what you certified geeks, bless you, need to grasp: What I wrote is exactly how this all feels to the teeming masses of geek wanna-bes.

Nobody’s really answered any of my questions. Telling me I oughtta go to WordPress.com isn’t actually an answer. The fact is, WordPress, as marvelous as I’m sure it really is, and as proprietary and protective as y’all feel about it – now that YOU understand it – could be designed and documented better. I wish I understood it, because if I did, I’d write documentation that anyone else, even a novice, could understand.

Somebody has censored my response to Darran….??? Not fair, guys. I’m not exaggerating when I say I had to stay up until 4 a.m. doing the work that I was supposed to be doing during much of the time I spent yesterday trying to figure out WP stuff. The cost of the complexity is real, and has real world consequences.

Anyway, the good news is that I’m having some success getting RSS feeds to work. Not all of them, mind you, but a few. It’s something. And now I’m off to the other forums to see if there’s a way to change the order of widgets in the sidebar without removing ALL of them and then putting them ALL back in the exact order <:-0 – seems so obvious that there should be a way to assign a sequence to widgets, but I sure can’t find it anywhere in the dashboard except for in Pages, which doesn’t help with the rest of the sidebar contents… Egads, again…

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about – the people who write the documentation assuming way too much of the user – from the Plug-ins section of my dashboard:

“To manually install a plugin you generally just need to upload the plugin file into your /home/——-/public_html/weblog/wp-content/plugins directory.

“Once a plugin has been installed, you may activate it here.”

Oookaaaaaayyy. I know where “here” is, cuz I’m at it. But where the heck is this /home/——-/public_html/weblog/wp-content/plugins directory?

On my webhost’s server, I assume. But that’s not enough to help me find it, since as a novice I don’t know what precedes /home/.

People who do the documentation should assume their reader understands the language they’re writing in. That’s the only assumption that should ever be made.

Well, no disaster. But am still getting the error message. So the bug wasn’t fixed in 2.7.1.

Darran: Simple? Everything about it is phenomenally complicated. If it was simple, this site wouldn’t have 40,000 pages of questions from very confused people. Even the page with the “famous 5-minute install” is just chockablock with jargon and assumptions.

Here’s an example:
For a particular problem, in the troubleshooting section it says:
Download wp-config.php (if you don’t have shell access).
– without ever telling you where you go to find wp-config.php.

This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. Step by step, A to Z, please, WordPress! If I’m such a novice that I need the detailed instructions, I’m going to have no idea on earth where to find the bloomin’ wp-config.php file in order to download it!

The problem is that the instructions are written by people who are so comfortable with the processes that they skip essentials without even being aware of it.

I’ve been trying to make some headway on fixing the glitches on my blog all day and this is the kind of ‘help’ I run up against continually. It’s a huge waste of time.

Not grouching at you, mind you. Just grouchy at WordPress. People will say, well, it’s free; get over it. But it’s not free if you spend 12 consecutive hours on it and get nowhere. That’s *expensive.* Please don’t take offense at the ranting that results.

The suggestion for my most immediate problem, which is an error message that keeps my blog from getting RSS feeds from other blogs, here https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/225382/page/2?replies=49 is to reinstall wp-admin. So, since I have no idea how to do that, I’m going to try to go to 2.7.1, since that should be a fairly automated process. I’m expecting some sort of disaster from it, though. I did back up my database, following instructions that didn’t really jive because they weren’t for 2.7. – and that was the official set of instructions from WP! Go figure…

Just look at that thread – a bunch of people all having the same problem, a half-dozen different possible fixes, most of which seem to work for some people (though they have no idea why) but don’t work for others. Simple? Aaaarrrrrgggggh.

Ah, Darren – I was replying to tacomamama, not you. Thanks for the offer.

Well, thanks, but it’s not a question of wanting. I do *want* to understand it all. I just am supposed to be doing something other than turning into a potato in my desk chair and sorting through scads of mostly useless google searches, sites, forums, and tips, all of which assume some level of proficiency or are apropo to a different release, or BOTH.

I actually started blogging because of an important community issue that has a steep learning curve all by itself. I don’t anticipate *ever* having 6 months to do nothing but figure out the weird glitch in latest release 3.2.4.1.3.9-and-a-half. It’s frustrating to have to put up with serious functionality issues because this code is out there full of bugs and incompatibilities, and it’s WAY too fractured: go here and fix this piece of code, then go somewhere else entirely and rename that file. Then download something from somewhere, tweak it, and upload it somewhere else. Egads!

I’m not worrying. I have strong geek tendencies, and geeky could be wonderful except that I have too much else to do. As I said, the software should serve us, not us it.

The point is, *is* there a point to all this? Couldn’t it be done a whole lot more straightforwardly and economically, effort-wise? I cannot believe all the different places you have to access just to administer one little blog. I guess that’s open source for ya. You know what they say about too many cooks…

Well, this is supposed to be the place for requests and feedback. My feedback is, it’s too complicated and counter-intuitive. My request is to make it nice and logical. I probably won’t live that long, tho.

Noelinfo:

Thank you for posting all this. Since you seem like a really nice guy, can I ask: could you please provide the step-by-step on reinstalling the wp-admin? I don’t even remember where this wretched little bugger lives.

I would never have dreamed that anything as clunky and fractured as WordPress would ever come into such wide use.

“Short description: WordPress is a blogging software with a focus on ease of use, elegance, performance, and standards with a huge selection of themes and plugins.”

BWAAaaaaaaHAAAAAAhaaaaaaaaaHAAAAAAAA, she says, losing it completely after a day of staring at arcane bits of unintelligible gibberish and visiting 16,000 different sites.

Curtis, thanks for your interest. I appreciate it.

If you think it might help, here’s the URL:
https://www.un-naturalgas.org/weblog

I see that I have some XHTML errors; all this is entirely new to me so I don’t yet know how to fix them, but also don’t have any reason to believe they might be the source of the problem.

Again, thanks for any input.

There’s no way to provide a link. It’s not a place, it’s a condition.

I hoped that there was a known issue between WordPress’s setup and Netscape’s security settings, and for a simple point in the right direction.