As you can see from editing of the last post, something Very Very Bad happened last week, causing quite a consternation. Through some digging, it appears my blog contracted the equivalent of a disease so bad and rare the doctor who discovers it gets to name it. (The ST:TNG episode “Genesis” got this exactly backwards.)
Yes, that is a Google page with FIVE search results, three of which are mine. After posting for help on the wordpress.org site (since this is not on WordPress itself), I was told it was a hosting thing. I did some more digging, specifically for “endurance-page-cache,” and found a couple of GitHub topics that pointed at the hosting service. Looking at the blog’s guts through an FTP site, I found a folder called “mu-plugins” that was not there when I backed up the blog in 2011. (YES I KNOW.) That folder had a creation date of June 21, 2017 — in the 72-hour period I had not touched the blog.
I deleted the mu-plugins folder. I clicked “Add Post.” IT WORKED.
This was the third thing in 10 days that blew up through no action on my part. Apple cut off iCloud in Mail for users of Mac OS 10.6.8 without warning (that’s not solved yet) and the SB Nation network blocked that OS’s version of Safari by switching to HTTPS (I had to switch to Chrome, and boy I miss Safari’s RSS functions).
I am going to hope that things are back to normal, even though hope is a dangerous thing. If this happens again and a solution is not so evident, I will create a static blog page and maybe do an every-week thing. That assumes everything else stays intact and (because tech stories require car analogies) I don’t find myself with a car suddenly unable to go into reverse.