Monkeyless

Ok, I just hit the most frustrating and confusing bug I’ve ever seen in Firefox, while trying to post my last Nikon D70/Canon Rebel XT comparison post.

I had been hitting “save and continue editing” in WordPress while writing it up. Eventually I was ready, and clicked on “Publish”. Nothing happened. I tried viewing the list of posts to see if it had gone through, but that wasn’t coming up.

So my first thought was that my web host was down. But no, it was up. Was the MySQL database corrupted? No, everything looks good in there, and I can see that the post went through and is in the database. And, I can still get to monkeyless.com if I don’t try to go through the blog subdomain. And the blog is up and running if I bypass the subdomain.

So next I go into cPanel and experiment with the subdomain. Remove it and recreate it and play with redirection. If I setup redirection so the subdomain just redirects you to the main domain, the blog works. But if I want to keep it saying blog.monkeyless.com, the page just never shows up.

Next I go and create an index.html file that will override WordPress’s index.php file. That works fine on the subdomain, so I start investigating WordPress’s settings. Since it broke when I tried to post, I assume that it tried to change .htaccess or something and messed things up. I get rid of the .htaccess file (which would break the permalinks, but that’s ok for now), but I still can’t bring the page up.

I try a lot of things. cPanel, WordPress settings, etc. Eventually I add an “echo ‘hi’” to WordPress’s index.php, before it’s displayed any content. I want to see if it gets that far. When I do that and try to bring up the page with the subdomain, it works fine. There’s my blog (with the word ‘hi’ at the top of the page.) I re-edit index.php to get rid of the ‘hi’, and the subdomain stops working once again.

(At this point I should probably have tested some other pages. No subdomain pages were working before, and adding an echo to that one page made it work? Were the others still broken? Who knows)

So at this point I manually telnet to port 80 on the web server and ask for the blog.monkeyless.com page. I get it. It works fine. Why doesn’t it work in Firefox? I load up IE, and voila, there’s my site. Switch back to Firefox, and it still doesn’t work.

Ok, I close all my tabs and quit Firefox, and then go back in. Now it works. That was weird.

So, I had deleted the camera post that caused all this mess while troubleshooting (after saving a copy on my computer, of course). I create a new post in WordPress, paste in my post, and click publish. And the domain stops working again in Firefox. This time it’s easier to fix, I quit Firefox and restart it, and everything’s fine.

I have no idea how I’d even submit this as a bug report to Mozilla. WordPress posting worked every time but this time on my subdomain. I pasted the exact same post into my local WordPress installation as a backup, and was able to publish it there just fine, so it’s not something weird in that post that’s breaking things. Adding that “echo ‘hi’” fixed it? I have no idea how to give the Firefox bug fixers anything that they can test to fix this.

The next big question is, will this post break it again? Did something change that makes my subdomain break in Firefox whenever I post something now? Or was it just that post. Let’s see what happens.

UPDATE: This post worked fine, it was just the camera post that broke it. This is just weird. If I feel adventurous, maybe I’ll try setting up WordPress on another domain somewhere and try posting my Camera Post of Death to it. The local machine that I posted it to is just using an IP address, so maybe that’s changing things around. But wow, this is just a weird little bug.