Joseph Zitt

I’ve always been told that it’s not good to go to bed angry. But waiting to calm down, after using my computers, means that I get very little sleep.

Following yesterday’s post about WordPress deciding on its own to start ignoring its configuration, a reader helpfully suggested a tool called WordPress Tune-up. I googled for the tool, found it, and went to the site.

Unfortunately, getting the tool to work is proving impossible so far. The first problem was getting at the code in the first place. The instructions on the site didn’t correspond, in a way that I could understand, at least, to how it was actually put together (though after only a couple ofl decades as a tech writer, maybe I’m too much of a newbie to get what the writer meant).

Getting toward the code meant finding a Download button hidden on another page. That page is encrusted with frames (one of the great historical disasters of early Web design, now mostly forgotten as a bad idea). Those frames led not to the code, but to a page that sent the code.

While I was finally able to get the code to my home machine, the Web server isn’t running on it, but on another machine off at the Web hosting site (wherever in physical space that may be). The obvious thing was to log on to that site and use the curl program which would grab the code from the website that provided it. That didn’t work, since, due to the hideous crap (frames, redirections, programs that complicate what a simple page of code should do) between the request and the code, what I got was irrelevant HTML.

I then wiped out the contents of the file on my server that had the right name but contained the useless crap, went to the code site, cut and pasted the code into the file (using the vi editor), and saved it.

Following the instructions, I then activated it as a WordPress plugin. Doing so, however, generated several lines of PHP error messages, rather than a useful result.

I then looked at the code itself, and discovered that it apparently was a front-end to something else entirely, which redirected something somewhere to somehow do something else. In other words, yet another layer of crap between me and getting things done.

And when I tried to save this post when I finished the first draft, I discovered that any attempt to do anything on the sire resulted in that same damned page of errors. I then logged back into my site and renamed the plugin file to something harmless, which is something less experienced users might not have known, or known how, to do.

So that’s where it stands now. I have no idea what the hell is wrong, and I’ve wasted over an hour doing something that is advertised as being simple. Perhaps the author of the plugin is doing something laudable, and perhaps the wizards of WordPress were doing something supposedly smart in doing whatever screwed up the blog formatting. But the benefits are proving hard for this user to see. And I’m in little mood to deal with the arrogant posturing that is so common when one asks for tech support in the open-source world.

Grr.