How to get wordpress, google to love each other?
February 3, 2010 6:28 AM   Subscribe

I have a little blog about HR/work. I am running profiles on people who are looking for jobs, to help them get their name out there. This morning, I broke my blog, right when the first profile was taking off. Somehow, the unholy trinity of wordpress, google gears, and google analytics stripped my site of all styling and now I can't log in to the admin backend to fix it.

I really want this lady to get the attention she deserves. I entered the issue on Wordpress support forums, but I don't expect to get a comprehensive answer anytime soon.
A) Does anyone know enough about all three tools to point me in the right direction?
B) How do you go about finding and selecting an ad-hoc site admin, someone who can keep me away, far far away, from tables and html and, basically, the entire back end? I'm happy to pay, at this point it's either pay someone else or delete the blog entirely.
posted by pomegranate to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)
 
Do you get a certain error message when you try to log in?
posted by mikepop at 6:43 AM on February 3, 2010


Response by poster: @ mikepop. Yes - If I enter my username and password and hit "log in". I get, "Oops! This link appears to be broken." (404) This is in Chrome, Explorer, and Firefox. I had tried google analytics this morning but when I realized I had to insert code, I uninstalled it. I then tried and then disabled google gears. I think one or both of these attempts/retractions is what killed me.
posted by pomegranate at 6:50 AM on February 3, 2010


Response by poster: Wait - actually - I just remembered something else. Like an idiot. I messed with the settings. I did tried to take the "wordpress" off of the title to be like all the cool kids, hit "save changes", saw that it didn't work, rewrote "wordpress" into the title, and hit "save changes" again.

Which actually points to why I really just need a blog administrator. If I can mess things up this bad with just that kind of change, I really shouldn't be accessing any of those screens.
posted by pomegranate at 6:57 AM on February 3, 2010


It sounds like you may have changed the url of your blog. So if your blog's address was yoursite.com/wordpress, you may have changed it to just yoursite.com. If this is what you did, then when you click links, Wordpress is taking you to yoursite.com/ when it should be yoursite.com/wordpress/.

What is the normal url of your blog? And what is the url in your address bar when you get the 404 error message?
posted by icebourg at 7:06 AM on February 3, 2010


In theory, that sort of change shouldn't break anything. In practice, it's hard to tell from here what you actually did.

What files did you change in the process of setting up gears and analytics? Do you have FTP access to where the files are?

Probably the easiest fix would be to have your hosting company restore the site from yesterday, when it was working. Failing that you can go ahead and post the site url here and let people here poke at it and see if we come up with anything useful.
posted by mikepop at 7:06 AM on February 3, 2010


Best answer: With a text editor, edit wp_config.php and add this line:

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://frannyoxford.com/wordpress');

and see if that fixes things.
posted by backwards guitar at 7:09 AM on February 3, 2010


Oh yes if by 'title' you meant 'URL' then backwards guitar's fix should do the trick. Make sure you have all the proper quotes in the proper places as well.
posted by mikepop at 7:14 AM on February 3, 2010


pomegranate - replied to your Twitter message; I'll be glad to help you get all of this fixed.
posted by mrbill at 7:53 AM on February 3, 2010


Best answer: I would try what backwards guitar advised, but also there is a second URL that you need to define:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL
posted by beyond_pink at 8:31 AM on February 3, 2010


I got everything fixed for her.
posted by mrbill at 8:38 AM on February 3, 2010


mrbill - It might be helpful to post the solution - for anyone who comes in here again.
posted by backwards guitar at 8:51 AM on February 3, 2010


Best answer: The hardest part was getting back in via FTP; had to have the host reset the password.
Once that was done I just added the following lines to wp-config.php:

define('WP_HOME','http://www.frannyoxford.com/wordpress');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.frannyoxford.com/wordpress');

Saved the file, shift-reloaded a couple times, and that was it.
posted by mrbill at 9:05 AM on February 3, 2010


Response by poster: This was total user error, nothing to do with google, and everything to do with me being a dumbass.
mrbill has agreed to be my site admin and I hereby resolve to never do anything on the site other than write words. He's in charge of everything else.
Thanks mrbill, and thanks for the answers you guys.
posted by pomegranate at 9:08 AM on February 3, 2010


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