So, I’m certain some regular readers will notice something is a little off about the site. It’s been that way for a while, actually, ever since upgrading to Graphene 2 – some elements of the site haven’t rendered correctly, and it’s honestly caused more trouble than you can imagine.
So, to make a very long story short, some elements of the theme, and the website by extension, no longer update properly when you tell them to. It’s complicated to explain to someone who doesn’t do any real website work (even then, I’m a novice on all fronts) so to explain it simply, there are part of the theme of the site – the look and feel – where I can put in code snippets for various purposes, like Google statistics tracking or advertisments.
Now, these sections of code won’t update correctly. Other options I can change just fine, but whenever it’s a part that involves code? It doesn’t work right at all – even if the changes look fine in the preview, they don’t actually change in the site.
That’s actually how I discovered the issue – my ads weren’t showing correctly, instead showing a snippet of the code as well as the ad, which looked ugly, to say the least. I went to change the code, and… nothing!
What’s worse, being the absolute genius I am ( that’s sarcasm, if you can’t tell) I decided that going into the database and editing the code by hand might solve the problem. I’ve had good results doing that before, but it seems the way Graphene stores code is different from how you or I would normally see and interact with it – the end result was me actually breaking the appearance of the site completely over the course of last night, which meant I had to spend quite a bit of time restoring things. Eventually, after making backups (that shouldn’t have even been able to be produced, given the state of the site) and restoring from those backups, things got fine, but that still leaves the bug in the site, somewhere (I’m fairly certain it’s in Graphene itself) that is causing me to be unable to update certain code segments.
Yeah, note that you should generally never go into your database and edit things by hand, but then again, I had backups just in case – they would be an emergency, though, but I knew enough to know I wasn’t risking too much damage, more of an annoyance than anything else. No critical data was damaged in any way.
So, after finally fixing that issue this afternoon, I’ve decided to use a side option for ad placement, and while I don’t like how much it seems to flood the site, it at least works for now.
That all being said, if the site seems to go crazy again sometime soon you will have a better idea as to why.
I’ll update you as things keep going.
Seriously though… never go into databases and edit them by hand unless you know exactly what you’re doing.