I’ve been using WordPress on my personal domain & hosting but it is really cumbersome if something goes wrong. Somedays back, my blog link just stopped working. I thought it to be temporary glitch but when it reached hours, I grew nervous. I should’ve spoken to the hosting service but somehow didn’t as other links were working. Thanks to Jetpack which kept telling me its down.
I decided to get down to it get my hands dirty. I tried to access via directory in browser but no avail. I set up a fresh install and chose same database. It worked to some extent but not really. All links were to old install which was not working. I could not login to admin for the same reason. It started to get messier from here. Instead of changing the the blog location url in database, I deleted the Users table. Now I’m totally locked out. Created new user, provided privileges and logged in but my old posts were not there. All my hard work to have some post was GONE!
Not really… they were in database now but I needed to figure out how to access them without disturbing the integrity. I linked the new user to the posts and voila! I was back – I lost all comments but there were not many. I believe my link was either subject to DDoS (quite unlikely as I’m not so popular) or hackers played some tricks. As this new link was a temporary fix, I cleaned up the original folder and did another fresh install. Exported the temporary blog and imported to the fresh version.
Then I realised it is not an easy task to maintain self-hosted WordPress in this bad world. Hackers, DDoS, server downtime. I logged into a unused WordPress.com and imported the posts backed up above. World was all rosy, till I realised, my photographs were not showing correctly. I could’ve lived with it as the issue was Flickr changed all links from http to https. I had already spent a good amount of time figuring above situation and now this – I was really getting impatient. I corrected some links and they started showing up. So why was this not observed earlier? Simple, Jetpack caches images to its server and they were being sever from WordPress but after I refreshed everything they had already started falling apart. By this time, I had taken WordPress Premium so I had some space, a new domain name option/redirect. Which means WordPress will have to be made my preferred location for photos (since I stopped using Facebook for now). I somehow prefer Flickr or Google+ for photos so it was hard for me. If I load full size image, I’ll loose the space provided quite quickly. As much I know, even resizing after uploading will not save space so have to resize it before I upload. I’m lazy and doing resize all photos was little disturbing for me. Of course, resizing only required photos is a good idea but I love to keep Hi-Res photos. Still, there was some hope but next step broke me. I tried looking for plugins but they were not there. WordPress does not support plugins so no more LightBox-es. Now, uploading photos in WordPress and that too no fancy look! Refund. I applied for refund but kept the domain name to be future proof incase I breakdown and stop using my hosting.
So, I’m back to where I started from. As of now, I’m visiting all links and and fixing up the links to get things working up for now for my images alongside looking for some good plugins where I could just give photo ID and it’ll work out all Flickr stuff but sadly mostly were for photosets, galleries or tags but not for photos. My hunt is on. If you are aware of any Flickr Plugin which will display single pic, comments are welcome.
I tried:
- Awesome Flickr Gallery
- Flickr Photostream
