Happy Earth Day, the one day a year that we celebrate the planet we’re living on (and hopefully care about for more than one day a year).
It’s a great day to go outside if it’s safe for you to do so, and maybe visit a national park or botanical garden nearby.
It’s also a great day to plant some trees and perhaps even switch to a search engine that plants trees with every search.
WordPress is an incredibly powerful and free content management system, blogging platform, site builder, etc, but sometimes things can go wrong. One day, you visit your site, and it’s not working quite right, it’s full of errors, or you even have the dreaded white screen of death.
The good news is, WordPress itself is rarely the problem. Each release goes through an extensive public testing phase before the final release is sent out. For example, WordPress 6.5 was available for public testing for 6 weeks before the final release. But, WordPress can also be extended by plugins and themes, and there are currently 59,399 plugins and 12,040 themes in the free directories alone. Both the WordPress developers and those who help with testing can’t test all of them. We rely on the plugin and theme developers to test their products instead, but that doesn’t always happen, which means that plugin or theme conflicts are often the most likely culprit in any sudden WordPress problem.
If your WordPress site suddenly breaks and you can still get into your Dashboard, try turning off all your plugins and switching to the default theme (the “Twenty” theme named after the current year, which is Twenty Twenty-Four this year). If that fixes the issue, turn the plugins back on one by one, and then your theme, to figure out which one was causing the trouble.
If you’re able to install plugins, give Health Check a try. This plugin’s Troubleshooting tab lets you deactivate all other plugins and change the theme with just a click, without affecting how regular visitors see your site.
If you can identify the plugin or theme causing the problem, report the issue to the support for that plugin or theme so its developers and support community can help you out.
If that made no difference, then your site could be suffering from missing or damaged core files. Go to the Updates section of your Dashboard and click “Re-install Now” to fix that.
If you can’t get into your Dashboard, no worries! There are still ways to handle it. First, give resetting your plugins a shot. If that does the trick, reactivate each one individually until you identify the problem.
If that doesn’t work, hop onto your server using SFTP or FTP (Mac folks, check out Transmit), or use a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel. Head to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your current active theme (so, if it’s /wp-content/themes/goodtheme/ make that /wp-content/themes/goodtheme-broken/). This should make the default theme kick in, if it’s installed, and rule out any theme-related issues.
As before, if you can identify the plugin or theme causing the problem, report the issue to the support for that plugin or theme so its developers and support community can help you out.
If that made no difference, make a manual backup of your site and download WordPress. Once you’ve got that, hop onto your server using SFTP, FTP, or your hosting account’s file manager. Then, delete every WordPress file except for the wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory, and replace those files with fresh copies from the download. This won’t affect your content or settings.
Some uploaders can have trouble overwriting files, so make sure you delete the original files before uploading the new ones.
Hopefully that’ll get you back into a working site, minus the plugin or theme causing the problem, of course.
If you’re still having trouble, please free to reach out to us in the WordPress support forums!
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is a 1993 animated film, and in a sea of 15 Batman films, it stands out as the best Batman film featuring the best Batman.
Mask of the Phantasm began life as a direct-to-video extended episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but upon seeing the quality mid-production, Warner Bros. quickly pivoted it to a full theatrical release, complete with the budget necessary to make it stand out even more. The film is not simply an animated feature, it’s an emotionally impactful Batman mystery (yes, he gets to be a detective) with relevant flashbacks that cover a far more in-depth and grounded origin than other Batman films.
The beauty of the hand-drawn animation can’t be understated. The backdrops and sets have an almost painterly quality, the keyframes are impeccably detailed, and the animation itself is incredibly smooth. There hasn’t been an animated feature like it since, and I doubt there ever will be.
To match that animation, the voice cast features some incredible talent. Alongside Kevin Conroy’s and Mark Hamill’s legendary takes on Batman and Joker respectively, the cast also includes Dana Delany, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Stacy Keach, and Abe Vigoda. Their performances, combined with an impeccable soundtrack by Shirley Walker, are just as immaculate as the animation, and again I must emphasize that there hasn’t been an animated feature like it since, and I doubt there ever will be.
In Batman: The Animated Series, Kevin Conroy established Bruce Wayne as a mask that Batman wears, and Batman as a man so consumed by his mission that he will sacrifice everything for it. Because of this, Kevin Conroy’s Batman feels more natural than any other Batman on film, and Mask of the Phantasm really lets that Batman shine. You really have to see it to understand just how well he embodies the character.
If you’re a Batman fan, an animation fan, or just a fan of great films, don’t miss Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, currently streaming on Max.
A whale of a tale or two.
Classic song aside, one thing to remember when you go whale watching is that there are a lot of whales in the ocean, and there’s a lot of ocean. Just have fun.
And that’s exactly what we did. We had an absolutely wonderful time on Da Whale Boat yesterday, a small boat that seats only 6 passengers along with a very knowledgeable captain and guide. We listened to whale song on a hydrophone and even saw a few whales, though nothing breached up close. I also reconnected with how much I enjoyed just being out on the water in a nice and relaxing boat filled with good conversation.
Here are some photos from the voyage:
I don’t have a tattoo to swear by, but I’ll gladly do this all again.
Last year, I had set a goal to blog far more often, and those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that failed spectacularly. I wasn’t quite sure why, but then I read Wil Wheaton’s post from two days ago, and it clicked. I had set myself a goal that, while reasonable for some folks, put pressure on me to produce long form content for something that I’m really just doing for fun. That pressure burnt me out, pushed me to posting much shorter content on Tumblr, and leaving this blog in the dust.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about what Matt Mullenweg said, “I want you to blog,” so I’m going to try Wil Wheaton’s answer to this problem.
I won’t be blogging every day, but I will be writing every day. Maybe I’ll publish a post every day after writing anyway. Maybe I’ll contribute to a draft over the course of several days. Maybe there will be several varying drafts that I contribute to. Maybe some of them will never be published. I’m honestly not sure what it will look like, but I’m excited to find out.
2024 begins today, and looking back, the top post here had staying power, since it was 2019’s Rewatch: Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger.
Here are some of my favorites from last year. I hope you enjoy them too:
This year, please share your voice and experiences with the world. If you don’t have a place to write yet, launch your site with WordPress.com, or try Tumblr if shorter content is your thing. And, if you don’t know what to write yet, join the Bloganuary Challenge for daily inspiration.
May your 2024 be what you make of it!
Not too long ago, the only way to have access to all TV content was not only to have a cable subscription but also to purchase every additional “package” of channels (and many overlapped to further drive home the wasted money). Netflix changed that when they pivoted to streaming in 2007, claiming that the days of cable subscriptions and packages were over, and that now you could subscribe to Netflix for one low monthly fee and see everything (or something like that). That was nice for a while.
Fast forward to today, and not only are there multiple streaming networks, but many are now packaging other streaming networks: Paramount+ with Showtime, Disney+ with Hulu, etc. Streaming saved us from cable subscriptions and packages, only to later rebrand cable subscriptions and packages.
Sorry for the long preamble, but after the whiplash of memories from this Tumblr post, I feel like we’re going through the same cycle with social media.
Not too long ago, the only way to have access to all of your friends online was to join a ridiculous number of social networks, which were all free money-wise but each carried their own cost in time spent scrolling. Eventually, that thinned out to the major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr. You only had to join at most 5 to follow all of your friends, but most of them supported cross-posting to something (usually Twitter), so if you were lucky, maybe you only had to join 1 social network.
Fast forward to today, and not only has the near collapse of Twitter and Reddit spawned multitudes of new social networks all vying for their users, but Twitter has effectively shut down all cross-posting. If your desire is to have access to all of your friends online, you must once again join a ridiculous number of social networks. Social media is fractured again.
I guess I’m fascinated by this system that creates too many options, narrows down the choices, and repeats. Is it our own battle between freedom of choice and fatigue over too many choices? I don’t know.
Allegedly there’s hope in ActivityPub, which is bringing the philosophy of email to social media (you don’t need a Gmail account to email Gmail users and an Outlook account to email Outlook users), but the barrier for entry is steep right now. Mastodon is at the forefront of ActivityPub work, but which server do you join (they all have different policies, practices, and core communities), and how do you find people to follow on other servers? I think it’s awesome that you can bring your followers and follows with you when you move to a different server, and that you don’t need to share a server with someone to follow them, but if the barrier for entry is already steep, how many people will even experience that?
Of course, there’s always my solution to the problem. I’m just not going to join everything this time. Tumblr satisfies my need for mass-connection, MLTSHP satisfies my need for a small almost “where everyone knows your name” community, RSS (with particularly NetNewsWire) satisfies my need for following sites, and the rest are text messages and email.
I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know where this is going. But the cycle is fascinating, or at least fascinating enough for me to put a lot of words down.
