Plug-in hijacker!

It seemed like such a great idea this morning. A s a matter of fact about 0930, right after the DH left for the airport. I have this theme that came with a built in template for Photo Galleries. Would it not be nice, I thought, to be able to easily have a page for the Arches, and a page for the 30+ pairs of socks that have come off the needles so far this year. Deceiving myself and ignoring the fact that I have been putting this off – I jumped in with both hands on the keyboard.

Pulling out the template, going to the developer’s blog, and reading it five time, it still did not make sense to me. PHP? Haven’t learned it, but I am fine with HMTL. The instructions just weren’t clear. But, he had a plug in! Hey, I can do plug-ins. This is WordPress. Download, unpack, and FTP.

Piece of cake.

Just a few minutes later I had it installed, pages named and pictures uploaded. Then it happened. Blithely hitting the “view the blog” button I got the Word Press equivalent of that lovely WinDoze blue screen of death. Blank – total and complete white out. Didn’t matter what I tried – I could not get anything to appear in my browser.

An hour later I had moved enough things around to get some of the screens to appear (let me tell you – SmartFTP is well worth paying the subscription).

It is getting warm, I am getting crabby and this was not how I had planned on spending my day.On the terrace was the plan.
Where I had planned on spending the Day

See that nice lounger? And I was going to wow you with my sock progress. (two whole rows on my Sockapaloolza and to the toe decrease on the Kew became the reality). Actually, I had planned a few cm on the Sockapalooza and finishing the first Kew, then casting on the second.

Socks in Progress

Instead, I sweated out two hours of updating WordPress to 2,2 in a vain attempt to rid myself of wonderful new restrictions on page changing and posting. Instead, it got worse. Every time I rid myself of one problem, another nasty little error unmasked itself, creeping in to join in the fun, trashing me further.

I ate Java Chip (Starbucks) ice cream at 1430 in a desperate attempt to console myself. I had a pile of files on the server and no blog. None. Nothing that would load, nothing I could reach and not enough knowledge to fix it. I couldn’t post and changing one too many parameters got me in a worse fix than the previous hour.

Have I mentioned that the lovely dudes who are diligently working on the master bathroom and DSs bedroom downstairs were stomping around all day? Making horrible quantities of noise and otherwise spreading dust with their cheer. DS Zimmer unter Bau
At 1700, the youngest two arrived home not interested in cleaning, working, or listening to me scream. They are off till Tuesday, taking away my quiet, solitude and ability to snivel unobserved.

Since the site was not reachable, I just took it down and for the next two hours downloaded what was left for an archive then rebuilt from scratch.

And it still did not work. My stubbornness kicked in. Really, there is no way that a simple program should be able to defeat anyone skilled enough to construct socks. I mean, really.

Of course, it helps if you don’t misspell something in the URL

Which I discovered after spending another hour removing the previous attempt and trying again.

This time was the charm.

I salvaged the database, finally managed to delete the pages from the album attempt. Since that still had its own files locked I wasn’t home free. Would you believe that I can’t upload pictures through WordPress? But I can drag and drop courtesy of FTP and I am hanging it. I wrote to the developer of the plug-in to see if he can give me any hints. A really nice guy, I don’t think the hijack was deliberate.

If I was a drinking woman, I would be 1/2 way through a bottle of wine by now. As is, I am hanging it for the evening and going to go swing my arm.

I would really appreciate a couple of you trying a test post and emailing me (proseknitic at yahoo dot de) if it doesn’t work.

-Holly

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About Holly

fiber person - knitter, spinner, weaver who spent 33 years being a military officer to fund the above. And home. And family. Sewing and quilting projects are also in the stash. After living again in Heidelberg after retiring (finally) from the U.S. Army May 2011, we moved to the US ~ Dec 2015. Something about being over 65 and access to health care. It also might have had to do with finding a buyer for our house. Allegedly this will provide me a home base in the same country as our four adult children, all of whom I adore, so that I can drive them totally insane. Considerations of time to knit down the stash…(right, and if you believe that…) and spin and .... There is now actually enough time to do a bit of consulting, editing. Even more amazing - we have only one household again. As long as everyone understands that I still, 40 years into our marriage, don't do kitchens or bathrooms. For that matter, not being a golden retriever, I don't do slippers or newspapers either. I don’t miss either the military or full-time clinical practice. Limiting my public health/travel med/consulting and lecturing to “when I feel like it” has let me happily spend my pension cruising, stash enhancing (oops), arguing with the DH about where we are going to travel next and book buying. Life is good!
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6 Responses to Plug-in hijacker!

  1. Kristin L says:

    Ouch. I feel for you.I’m still too scared to delve deeply into teh code on my site or blog. I suckered someone else to pull their hair out for me 😉 Anyways, I first got a 404 error (whatever that means), but there was a nice note to not waste any time and just click the link. Which I did. Which brought me here. So maybe that means it’s working. Or at least you’ve succeeded in a work-around.

  2. Carrie says:

    Yikes! Hope this comment goes through o.k. I didn’t know they have Starbucks ice cream in Germany–sounds like it was a good thing you had some on hand.

  3. Marit says:

    Good luck!Hope it works out now.

  4. amanda j says:

    Working fine for me, and my details were even saved!

  5. Laura says:

    Hello!

    So far so good. Sorry to read about your computer issues stealing away from knitting time–just not right! Hopefully all is well now!

  6. Hi Holly! The last time I attempted something on my blog, I lost (missplaced??) ALL my archives. I tried fixing whatever it was I did but just made things worse. Then I walked away and called it a day. Outsmarted by a machine once again.
    How long before you will be without the sling?

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