MarkWhittaker.com

I love using WordPress for my blogs. For the most part, it’s really simple to set up and use, and with the amazing number of plug-ins, you can run a website with almost no programming knowledge.

I’ve had my self-hosted blog for about six years, and it’s been a good experience, although my blog posting has been erratic. I’ve learned enough programming to be dangerous and enough to be frustrated when I can’t figure out what’s wrong. The frustration level surged a couple of weeks ago when a friend (thanks @reedsirinek) told me he couldn’t leave a comment on a recent post.

After hitting the comment submit button, the site returned a page-not-found 404 error. OK, I looked through my WordPress comments settings and didn’t find anything obviously out of place. Next step: put Google to work. Google steered me to a variety of posts in the WordPress.org support forum. Some posts described similar problems, although they pre-dated the current version of WordPress by a year or two.

No help on WordPress support forum

The advice was old, but I tried some of the recommended steps — jiggling permalink and discussion settings and even themes — all to no avail. I even took a look at my .htaccess file to look for glitches. I resolved the 404 error problem, but the commenting function was still broken. After submitting a comment, the site simply returned to the original blog post with no comment added.

I let the problem percolate for a week or so, and finally hunkered down to look into it this weekend. I did a few more Google searches, and even posted my own question about it on the WordPress forum. After a day, I got no response. (That’s not a criticism. Volunteers run that support forum, and they do a great job. I was impatient.)

Finally, the solution came not from looking at code, but by noticing something on a blog site I read occasionally. That blog uses Disqus, a nifty commenting platform that has more features than I’ll ever use. What, I wondered, if there’s a WordPress plug-in for Disqus and I can bypass the built-in WordPress comment functions?

Sure enough, I found the Disqus plug-in, and after a couple of minutes had signed up for a Disqus account. It worked! At least for a moment. The comments showed up, and there was no 404 error. After a couple of test posts, however, I realized the comment counter wasn’t working. A quick jump back to Google uncovered an easy solution — clicking a radio button in the plug-in admin — and I was off to the comment races.

I tested a variety of themes, and the Disqus set-up worked with most — but not all. I’m planning to experiment with some new themes over the next few weeks, so I’ll need to be mindful of how comments are affected.

Lessons? Obviously, there’s more than one way to solve a perplexing problem. It would be cleaner to figure out where the original error is, but I’m satisfied with the creative work-around. Lesson 2: Test my site more often to make sure things are working as they should, at least until I’m getting a steady flow of comments!

Dear readers,

The comment function for my site is broken. I’m still trying to figure out how to fix it, but I wanted to let you know that I am aware of the problem.

Thanks for stopping by. There are a few more changes coming soon!

Mark

I’ve been stewing for a while about Seth Godin’s notion (assertion?) that “We Are All Weird.” That’s the title of his most recent book, which describes the demise of “mass,” as in mass marketing, mass education and opiate of the masses.

The 97-page book’s theme hits home because the failure of “mass” is a root cause for the crumbling newspaper industry, in which I worked for 30 years. Godin’s explanation for the growth and acceptance of weirdness rings true, but there are one or two sour notes in there, at least for me. The problem? I’m NOT weird, at least not weird enough. Indeed, reading Godin’s book makes me wish I was weirder.

For reasons too various to explain in this article, the society of “mass” inspired by the industrial revolution worked just fine for me. I was successful in public school largely because I followed the rules, studied and the learned the material presented to me and was good at taking tests. That success prepared me for college, where I was a little less “successful” in terms of grades, but very successful in terms of preparing for a career in journalism. I spent most of my time at the Temple News, even serving as editor one semester.

I grew up in suburbia, landed a job before my college graduation day, worked my way up the newspaper ladder, got married, had a couple of kids, changed newspapers a few times, became a manager — all of it a pretty “normal” life progression. In fact, I was proud of the “normalcy” of it all, even though a part of me hated being normal. Normal means average, and who wants to be average?

A variety of life events have punctured the fiction of my “normalcy.” And it’s safe to say that my career in the newspaper industry, which ended with a layoff three years ago despite my shift to the online side of the business, has given me a front-row seat to watch the collapse of mass. Never — at least since the invention of the printing press — has the saw “You can’t be all things to all people” been more true.

Godin’s book makes me uncomfortable because even though I can accept the 21st century fallacy of “normal,” I have yet to embrace my “weird.” Of course, it’s not that I need to find something weird about myself. It’s that I need to uncover and celebrate the things that make me unique — the things that separate me from “mass” and “normal.” We all have those weird parts — whether it’s a love for baseball or the Beatles or collecting shot glasses from vacation destinations.

Somehow, I know that my life’s work remains in media/marketing/communications. I just haven’t brushed the dust off enough weirdness to know exactly how I can make my best contribution to those in my life and in my world.

Disclosure: The link to Seth’s book is an afflilate link.