My 18-year-old WordPress site started suffering waves of increasing breakage around the year 2020. First, every one of my posts had its special characters (—, etc) turned into mojibake. Then, all my posts became completely uneditable as the post editor was replaced with a "block editor" that does not understand my existing Markdown and HTML posts.
I've since:
- Installed the "Classic Editor" plugin,
- Added define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1'); to my wp-config
And here's where things get weird!!
Now the old latin1 characters in my old latin1 posts display right, and the posts created with the old text edit interface can be edited.
But!!
There is ONE POST, which I made last year, after the waves of breakage. I made it in the block editor, containing UTF-8 characters.
Ugh, I think—I guess I have to edit out the UTF-8. I go to edit it.
This post can no longer be edited by any means!! All my block-edited posts and drafts are just blank in the editor!! Even if I turn Classic Editor off!!
@mcc@mastodon.social would setting the charset to utf8 work?
For the encoding, not the part where you can’t edit.
All the energy I might have put into blogging is instead eaten by the never-ending treadmill of dumping a shockingly large amount of work each year just into fixing the breakage on my existing WordPress install ( which is still not working, and even if I fixed the mojibake on the front page, it would not be working: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114875723743858920 ).
Sometimes I say I want [thing] but can't get it, and people reply "well, why don't you try self-hosting?" and this is the reason why. The reason I don't self-host is I tried self-hosting Wordpress once and it turned into a never-ending, inescapable series of miserable obligations I can't get away from two decades later.
Sometimes I say I want [thing] but can't get it, and people reply "well, why don't you try self-hosting?" and this is the reason why. The reason I don't self-host is I tried self-hosting Wordpress once and it turned into a never-ending, inescapable series of miserable obligations I can't get away from two decades later.
Okay. I experimented with this, and I've now found that I can get into the bad state and out of the bad state, and I believe I have a "repro". So now I have a question: Should I place my hand into a garbage disposal and turn it on? Sorry, let me rephrase that. Should I try reporting a bug on the Automattic bug tracker?
Okay. I experimented with this, and I've now found that I can get into the bad state and out of the bad state, and I believe I have a "repro". So now I have a question: Should I place my hand into a garbage disposal and turn it on? Sorry, let me rephrase that. Should I try reporting a bug on the Automattic bug tracker?
If I try to post on the Automattic bug tracker am I gonna get banned for saying on Mastodon that I don't like Matt Mullenweg's vibes
If I try to post on the Automattic bug tracker am I gonna get banned for saying on Mastodon that I don't like Matt Mullenweg's vibes
Posted it. I guess if you like reading detective stories in the form of a bug report, you can read this:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/63825
Despite my fears the wordpress bug reporter is quite painless to use, except for the fact that while trying to figure out what my wordpress.org username was in 2008 so I could log in I had to log into my deadname's email, which did feel a little bit like putting my heart in a garbage disposal and turning it on, but that is not Automattic's fault
@mcc@mastodon.social on the plus side this implies he’d be able to search your posts so you’re fine i guess?
@mcc@mastodon.social only slightly more useless suggestion: the one and only one advantage static site generators have here (because you’re still going to debugging it breaking every twelve months) is at least your posts are all in flat files and you don’t have to worry about losing the original source
@phillmv@hachyderm.io I have a static site generator blog, but the problem is my old posts on the wordpress blog are still locked in wordpress, and I don't want to just delete them. I am not aware of any wordpress->ssg migration tool which allows preservation of comments.
@phillmv@hachyderm.io I have a static site generator blog, but the problem is my old posts on the wordpress blog are still locked in wordpress, and I don't want to just delete them. I am not aware of any wordpress->ssg migration tool which allows preservation of comments.
@mcc@mastodon.social yeah unfortunately “comments on an SSG thing” usually means “you have to find something else for comments”. I’m pretty satisfied with Comentario (https://gitlab.com/comentario/comentario) (I run my own instance) and when I helped @nex3@mastodon.social set it up for her blog she managed to re-import her old comments from another system to it but it definitely was a bit hacky. But it worked.
@mcc@mastodon.social yeah unfortunately “comments on an SSG thing” usually means “you have to find something else for comments”. I’m pretty satisfied with Comentario (https://gitlab.com/comentario/comentario) (I run my own instance) and when I helped @nex3@mastodon.social set it up for her blog she managed to re-import her old comments from another system to it but it definitely was a bit hacky. But it worked.
mcc
