Like any self-respecting guy I consider myself smart enough to work without instructions – building flatpack furniture, assembling barbeques, building a patio for it to sit on, spraying fences with cuprinol (the fence paint stuff), that sort of DIY thing – I mean how hard can it be, right? You know what I’m talking about men, I know you do 
Similarly, I have the same approach to software – like WordPress, for example. Upgrade the blog to the latest version? Pah! Easy. I’m a man! I can do it blindfolded with both hands tied behind my back using my nose to tap the keyboard.
Whadd’ya mean, disable the plugins first? Pffft. No way, I’m a dude.
Well, the blog gave up and stopped co-operating with me. Things just weren’t working right, what with images failing to display, the RSS not delivering the goods and some of the plugins not (cough) working.
Figuring I’d done some ‘error of omission’ when I’d recently updated, I simply uploaded the upgrade.php file again and tried running it. Everything appeared to be going smoothly … except the RSS still wasn’t working. Hmmm.
Now, like any guy, I started to dig down into the guts of things and pull stuff apart looking for the problem. After a bit, I thought ‘stuff it’ and uploaded the entire WordPress machinery again, overwriting everything.
Triumphant, I checked the RSS – still not working. Drat! Must be the database. So I rummaged around, tweaking the database, repairing it, scanning through lots of entries looking for an error that must’ve occurred. I reuploaded WP. Nadda. This was getting annoying.
I deleted the entire blog from the server and reuploaded WordPress. Nope. Still didn’t work properly. Wtf?! I finally read the instructions on upgrading on the WordPress site (which is where I learned I was supposed to turn off the plugins).
Fine, I’ll use Fantastico (the autoscript installer often bundled with cPanel with various hosting packages). That should do the trick! Damn, it wouldn’t install because I’d been manually updating WordPress.
After a bit of thought I realised their must be a file somewhere that tells Fantastico whether a script is installed or not – rummage, rummage, rummage – aha! Found it. Sorted. So I installed WordPress with a shiny new installation by Fantastico. I updated the new database with the information from the old one, uploaded my various plugins and themes and also the various images used in the blog. Perfect! Except it wasn’t. The RSS still wasn’t working!
Which is when I remembered I’d enabled the ‘stop hotlinking’ facility on the server and hadn’t bothered to check to see if I had allowed the RSS to be syndicated. When I say, ‘hadn’t bothered to check,’ I actually mean I hadn’t actually read anything regarding file extensions – I’d simply clicked the button. I’m a guy! What did I need instructions for?
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