The Perils of Blog Updates, Glitches, and Digital Dilemmas – Tales of Fear, Frustration, and Strategies for Keeping Your Online Oasis Thriving.
Biggest blogger’s phobia. One of my greatest fears is waking up and realizing that my blog is not loading anymore. I believe this is a fear shared by every blogger who cares about their website.
Yesterday, I started working on it, meaning I tried to update the blog’s theme, which was a few versions behind. In the WordPress admin interface, it didn’t show that I had anything outdated because I modified the theme and the theme plugin versions, tricking WordPress into thinking they were up to date. I don’t like those red numbers notifying you about things that need updating. I advise you not to do what I did and keep everything on your blog up to date.
I didn’t update the theme because even if it’s good and has more options than most free or paid WordPress themes (over 300 customization options), there have been cases where new versions had programming errors and some features I needed stopped working.
Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try and bring it up to date, so I updated both the WordPress theme and its controlling/customizing plugin, following the instructions provided by the powerful CMS developers.
After updating it, I immediately noticed that certain things weren’t working: the “back to top” button and the code I added to fix the cacophony in the default WordPress comment form (“Post Comment”). As for the button to return to the top of the page, I don’t know what the issue is because I didn’t spend much time investigating, but I saw that the theme developer completely changed the theme source, and that’s why my added code stopped working.
On top of that, due to the modifications, if you had a child theme, it wouldn’t function anymore, from what I read on the WordPress theme forum.
I don’t have such a theme that helps with preserving certain settings when you update the main theme of the blog, so when I bring it up to date, I also need to optimize it again (compress CSS, JS, custom code, social buttons, etc.).
To get a better understanding of what’s wrong with the new updates, I paused Cloudflare from the CDN interface, and… I got a 500 error (Internal Server Error). I cleared the cache, but nothing changed: Internal Server Error, and so on, until I canceled the Cloudflare pause. I don’t know what’s up with this behavior, but I didn’t bother to investigate further: I restored the old theme and the configuration plugin, cleared the cache again, and everything went back to normal. I’ll wait for a proper version of the theme to come out, especially since the one I’m using isn’t really outdated.
Even though I back up my blog every day, in addition to the backup performed by the hosting company, and I know that I can rebuild the blog no matter what happens, I still have this fear of visiting the site and seeing that it’s not functioning. I believe this fear is part of the phobias that bloggers who care about their blogs have and want to keep them online at all times.
Do you share the fear of waking up to find your blog not functioning, and how do you cope with the challenges of updating and maintaining your website? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!