CT Blue

Here’s my story, it’s sad but true.

About my troubles with CTBlue.

It took my words and ran away.

And was not fixed, for many a day

For the benefit of anyone born after 1955, the above is sung to the tune of “Runaround Sue”.

It is entirely possible that somebody, somewhere, noticed that this blog has been malfunctioning for the last several days. In case such people exist, they may be curious to know what happened, and that is the purpose of this totally non-political post.

I do all my blogging on my Ipad. I haven’t written a post on my computer for many a year. I write a draft on a Markdown app, of which I have several, and then copy and paste it into the WordPress App, and upload it from there.

Several days ago I wrote this post about my second-born’s new (and great) book, and when I went to upload it, I not only got an error message to the effect that it could not be uploaded, but I noticed that the post I had written before my book review had also not uploaded.

My site is hosted by a company called Blue Host, which is not related, so far as I know, to the Democratic Party, though it shares a color. I called tech support and, of course, had to make my way through a robot that demanded my “validation code”, as if I was supposed to know that I needed such a thing or knew where to find it. I find that yelling and screaming at these things usually leads them to transfer you to an actual person, which is what eventually happened.

After checking out my site, the guy who answered my call allowed as he was not expert enough to deal with it, and it would have to be kicked upstairs. My guess is that upstairs is in India, as the support emails I received all came in at around 6:30 in the morning and all the tech people had Indian sounding names.

Anyway, at first an expert (I think they kept handing it off one to the other) told me to enable a plug-in and check out a forum support page at WordPress, where people getting the same error message discussed a number of solutions, which did or didn’t work for various participants. I am computer literate to a certain extent, but as I told the expert in a follow up email, all this was Greek to me.

Anyway, after enabling the suggested plug in I tried editing a piece on my computer from within the WordPress site. It allegedly uploaded, but when I looked to see if it had, the entire site was down, with this message displayed:

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

If the theoretical personages that I posited above checked out the website during this period, that’s what they would have seen.

The tech people suggested yet another solution, which I tried, and that seemed to work, as the home page of the site looked fine. Except, as I was writing this post, and attempted to get the links to the two posts I mentioned above (don’t forget to buy the book!), I found that the links were inoperative. So, yet another day and another reply from India, with another solution, which this time seems to work.

So for about a week the world had to do without this blog. I sincerely hope the election is not affected, unless my literary absence increases Biden’s chances.