WordPress issues this last week

17 Jul 2009

Recently upgraded along with the rest of the world to WordPress 2.8.1 and hit a whole bunch of craziness that essentially encouraged me to move even this site across to WebFaction (eating your own dog food and all that) because of no longer being able to post from the WordPress admin panel.

I hadn’t changed any plugins, and the rest of the net was conspicuously quiet, so I figured that either my current host had near-simultaneously upgraded the database & corrupted something along the way (with MySQL this can result in read-only tables in certain cases, I’m told), or else there was something more sinister at work. No plugins had changed, and because nothing else functioned differently for even a moment I presumed innocence on their behalf. I tried with and without Google Gears enabled, with and without tags, in different saved statuses, and still nothing worked!

Anyway. Turns out it was my use of the term “wget”. (Even now I need to be careful as I write that!)

mod_security on Apache basically threw up its lunch every time I threatened to post about it. Accordingly, I can’t share with you some things that I’ve learnt in migration just yet, and haven’t been posting about anything else as I’ve been trying to resolve this problem, thinking it was preventing me from posting. Perhaps mod_security is trying to get me to write about more meaningful things than file transfer trickery! *yawn*

At any rate, it’s all over now and we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming shortly.