Broken blog
This blog has been badly neglected for quite some time. At first, it was due to a couple of years working in a job which demanded a lot of extra hours, and somewhat sapped my enthusiasm for doing anything vaguely constructive that involved sitting at a computer when I didn’t have to be. Then the arrival of my son laid waste to getting anything productive done that wasn’t strictly baby-related. In the past year blog drafts have been started, but ended up fallen by the wayside, languishing in purgatory indefinitely. Eventually I might find time to resurrect them, but for now I’m focusing on current projects instead.
Somewhere along the way I changed hosting provider and reinstalled everything. I became aware that I could no longer upload any media. Annoying as it was, I didn’t have any time to dedicate to fixing it until recently. I spent a few hours I could have spent doing more interesting things looking into this problem. Yet no matter what I did, every attempt to upload an image to a post was met with an unhelpful ‘No!’.
Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2014/01. Is its parent directory writable by the server?
I struggled for a few hours, changing all my directory and file permissions. I googled the error message and trawled through many sites that suggested editing files and permissions. None of the solutions provided a fix for me though.
My ultimate fix is lazy, but I don’t have any more time to invest in this. It’s also effective. I installed WP Flash Uploader. I now have some means of inserting the odd image into a post. Case closed for now.
Next up – broken Jetpack. My WordPress dashboard has been whining for months about how I needed to install Jetpack. “Future upgrades to WordPress.com Stats will only be available in Jetpack”. So I installed Jetpack, which then complained “The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site”. More googling revealed that my hosting provider doesn’t enable access to xmlrcp.php” without forking out more cash. Doh! Not to worry, Google Analytics and another Plugin to the rescue. For now it seems that the answer to all my wordpress woes is “there’s a plugin for that”.