A Commonplace Book

In a stunning insight that I’m sure they teach you on the first day of HTML school, I realized why I was having so much trouble getting a “Related Posts” plugin working.

I couldn’t figure out why pages remained the same even after I was pulling all of the code out of them. Equally frustrating was when they started changing at random a few minutes later. I forgot I had the wp-cache program running, which caused the delay between changes to the code being made and changes to the pages displaying.

Once I disabled that and cleared the cache, every change I made was instantly recognized. Getting the formatting set took only a few short minutes after that.

Whew.

Unfortunately, I reinstalled most of my wordpress theme files in an attempt to troubleshoot this, which means I lost my personalized page banners. Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to recrop them and reup them sometime tomorrow.

Lesson learned? Backup everything. And don’t be an idiot.

I spent all of my lunch break trying to figure out how to get the Wasabi Related Posts plugin to work properly and only managed to screw my entire page up behind repair, forcing a reinstall of the Wordpress theme I am using.

I think I deleted a quotation mark somewhere, causing the font to grow bigger as I scrolled down the page.

The mySQL database update necessary for the plugin was easy enough, but it turns out getting the php call “?php related_posts(); ?” into your Wordpress loop so that the links come out with bullet points and prefaced by “Related Posts” is nearly impossible.

I’ll put a bit more thought into this process after work before I throw the towel in and move on to a different plugin.