How to break your blog in 2 easy steps

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So, some of you might have noticed that when you’ve come to the road2blogging.com blog over the last couple of days that the site might have looked a little strange.  Well, I decided to have a little bit of a play around with the blog, as there were a few things that I wasn’t too happy with – yes I could’ve paid a designer to have a look at the blog or indeed design me a new theme, but I’m determined to keep the costs down for this blog and that means not spending any money on the blog until I’ve actually made some from it (other than setup of hosting and domain charges).  So, after reminding myself of a post over at problogger – Be brave and break your blog –  I started to edit some files and play around with my css stylesheet.  Here’s a summary of what I did and how I broke the blog in 2 easy steps:    

Step 1 - Play with your CSS style sheet

I learned HTML back in 2005, so I thought that earlier this week I’d have a play with my CSS stylesheet – not hard I thought as I’d tweaked a couple that were on some of my other websites.  I’m a person that believes in doing some things myself – one so I can learn from what I’ve done right (or wrong in this case) and two because I always trust myself (well, most times anyway).  I went straight ahead changing things and reformatting the size of text boxes, widening the actual theme background (including header and footer) and then I decided to play around with some of the graphics.  I had some difficulty with certain things, like making sure I was matching multiple for multiple with the different sizes on the sheet (meaning that the writing column is as big as the background for it) and had to go back a couple of times to adjust certain things.  Yeah I knew a few people would be ok with it and come back again, or that I may lose a reader or two along the way, but I was learning wasn’t I?  I also got some advice from Paul over at Technicallyeasy.net and I’d highly recommend his blog to any non-tech noob blogger.

So, what happened?  Well, I went away from the computer for a few hours and this is what turned out when I came back:

Fun, absolutely no theme to the blog at all – I went into the dashboard and had a look at the theme – it was loaded and everything was ok, I couldn’t understand what was up – was it the CSS style sheet changes I had made?  I tried doing so many changes, replacing code, but it still was showing up like in the above picture– I’d spent 30minutes on it and was getting frustrated!  Hmm, I thought “I’ll try 10 minutes away from the computer and come back to try something else”– I wasn’t sure, so I loaded on the original one style sheet – it worked! wahoo!  So I then put back the one I had changed, which resulted in this:

It defaulted back to the ‘default’ wordpress theme – then I thought “oh no, I upset wordpress, Again!”  I decided to re-activate the theme and see if everything would load up, as I could always load the original theme without changes couldn’t I?  Well, it surprised me as the theme actually showed up as it was supposed to this time and without any glitches – but I did un-install and re-install all of the plugins.

UPDATE: I’ve just found out (when I was making some more changes to the stylesheet) that disabling the WP-Cache plugin would’ve helped me loads and saved me lots of time, duh!

Step 2 - Fondle with your RSS redirects

So, as I was playing about with my CSS earlier in the day and managed to ‘fix’ the problem I thought I would go through the 404 log that is kept on the control panel and run by the plugin redirection.  I noticed a few 404 errors and corrected them by setting up some redirects to the correct posts that people were looking for.  When I was doing this I made a redirect for the blogs RSS feed, as http://www.road2blogging.com/feed/ was showing up in error and not linking to my Feedburner feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/road2blogging.  Why I did this I don’t know but I set up a redirect from the first to the second, when I brought up the first URL nothing came up in the browser, so I thought it must have been something to do with the feed not redirecting, so I ‘helped’ it on its way.  DUH!  All I did was send my RSS feed in a continuous loop showing up an error message wherever you went, and so posts weren’t published.  Shame on me – but when I got back from shopping I quickly noticed that I’d made a mistake (when I noticed the post wasn’t showing up in my RSS reader) – good job I always check my posts in my RSS reader.

What I learned

Setup a separate site to do your testing - I really should’ve done this

Always disable WP-Cache before you ‘refresh’ for any changes

When you can’t actually do it, go and have a coffee, 10 minutes away and then attack, attack, attack!

Leave your RSS feed alone when you’ve set it up, only make changes in your feedburner control panel

So, I learned my lesson, play with your blog, but always do it on a test site.  You don’t have one?  Well I’d suggest getting one, even if it is a .info or .co.uk site or any other one that is fairly cheap on the market.  Just set it up as you have your blog at the moment, with all the plugins etc.  I’d also advise you to put in your .htaccess file a block to all the search engines bots out there, especially Google, as they’ll penalise your second site for duplication – yes, I know it’s a test site, but you really need to do this just in case you want to sell the site in the future.  Not sure how to update your .htaccess file?  Then, you’ll want to sign up to my RSS feed and watch out for my series of Newbie Blog Steps for Newbie Bloggers.

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