What could be a bet­ter sub­ject for a first post than the prob­lems I ran into while set­ting it up. I kind of like the irony in that. Like a lot of peo­ple I have this love-hate rela­tion­ship when it comes to any­thing dig­i­tal. I make money because I have a cer­tain degree of exper­tise in the field but come think of all the times I’ve been extremely frus­trated, at least half of them where spent scour­ing forums, look­ing for a solu­tion for some annoy­ing com­puter prob­lem. Down­grad­ing my girlfriend’s OS from XP to Win­dows Vista was one of them (and I never suc­ceeded).
When I decided to start my own web­site using Word­Press, some­thing I’d never done before, I thor­oughly under­es­ti­mated the project. But I am a true per­fec­tion­ist. I made three designs in Illus­tra­tor, three sta­tic web­pages in Dreamweaver and two in Word­Press. Of course I had to design the thing myself, so only a fully cus­tomized Word­Press site could be good enough. A thou­sand mile jour­ney starts with the first step so I started running…

Self-hosting

Before I start a web­site I make a mockup in Illus­tra­tor with the exact dimen­sions of the final prod­uct. This way I’m able to export images and ban­ners directly as I’ve envi­sioned them. After the mockup is ready a good web­de­sign prac­tice is to con­vert it into sta­tic HTML pages, ensur­ing you cre­ate browser com­pat­i­ble CSS (and/or Javascript and jquery). Work­ing locally ensures effi­ciency. For any con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem like Word­Press to work locally you’ll need to install soft­ware and a data­base. Thus my strug­gle with MAMP began. Sure, my tuto­r­ial sim­ply said: “… and then you’ve got your server installed locally and you’re ready to go!”. If the darn thing would work that is. Apache servers!?! I don’t even know what they do. Because the red light kept star­ing at me and the peo­ple post­ing solu­tions on the forums had to be from Mars or some­thing I typed “MAMP alter­na­tive” in Google and tried XAMPP.

It worked…

For those inter­ested, I used Sequel Pro for my data­bases which didn’t give me any trouble.

.htac­ces (part 1)

After installing Word­Press I entered the world of user-friendly perma­links. Word­Press has build in func­tion­al­ity to change your unread­able WordPress-generated urls into read­able ones. When I tried to, it started yap­ping about some unwritable .htac­ces file. Ever heard of that, I hadn’t! To the forums. More alien talk. Used a ter­mi­nal to delve very deep in obscure files edit­ing file per­mis­sions of code I couldn’t read. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing so I gave up, for now…

PHP Search Form

I’m not well versed in PHP. To put it more bluntly, I’m not versed in PHP. All Word­Press’ dynamic func­tions are gen­er­ated using PHP so I was in trou­ble. Besides the fact I had to care­fully build the var­i­ous pages com­pris­ing a Word­Press tem­plate, I made the error of tak­ing the search form out of the dynamic side­bar and putting it in my header. For some rea­son it had a dis­as­trous effect on the search results page, adding a five inch white col­umn on the left side. Of course these things you’ll only find out by trial and error. Even now I have no idea why it happened.

Plu­g­ins

A a cer­tain point in time I installed a vari­ety of Word­Press plu­g­ins, but not all of them worked the way I expected them to. After installing a cou­ple of plu­g­ins my lay­out went awry, with a white bar show­ing beneath the footer. Inspect­ing the page with the Fire­fox devel­oper tool­bar I found out it wasn’t my CSS which did the trick because the white was in the HTML tag. So it had to be gen­er­ated by Word­Press itself.

WordPress.com stats: I don’t know why but after instal­lat­ing this plu­gin a tiny smi­ley was found in the bot­tom left cor­ner of my web­page. It cre­ated the extra space after my footer. I wasn’t able to solve it so I added a black back­ground color to the HTML tag.

Con­tact Form 7: Didn’t work. I didn’t receive any emails.I found out after read­ing a cer­tain post it had to do with my host­ing provider and restric­tions con­cern­ing emails. That was after I had installed two other con­tact forms. The excel­lent “Fast Secure Con­tact Form” pro­vided lit­tle help but­tons explain­ing what was what. I cre­ated an email account at my host­ing provider, and lo-and-behold, it worked. It made me a happy man.

WP backup: Had the same issues with back­ups, couldn’t get email back­ups. Cre­ated another emailad­dress at my host­ing provider specif­i­cally for back­ups and it worked.

.htac­cess (part 2)

Back to the .htac­cess issue. Even after mov­ing my site to my host­ing provider the .htac­cess prob­lem remained. I decided to email my host­ing provider, explain­ing the issue telling them I didn’t even know where the file was sup­posed to be. They returned some­thing which was just as unread­able as the stuff I read before on some forums. But they did tell me it was a file in the “public-html” folder, the main folder where your site exists. I’d read it was a “hid­den” file and indeed I couldn’t find it in the public-html folder. Finally I just made the file myself and put it in this folder. A per­fect exam­ple where I had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and that was good enough. Prob­lem solved.

There were a great num­ber of other prob­lems, but these where the ones I just didn’t know where to start and the ones tak­ing up the most time to solve.

No related posts.