Yesterday was a bit of a mess for me publishing anything. I had a bit more intended than what I got out (which was only the review of AVGN episode 51) but with limited time to actually write and publish I had to pick my battle, and that article was the one I decided to go with. I wrote it in the time I had (wasn’t too hard, I knew what I wanted to say, generally) and hit publish.
And… error. Huh, that was odd. I figured it was a fluke, so I tried again. Nothing.
Okay, let me just close the browser and start again. I go back and find the article I had written empty.
Well damn, ain’t that a mess? Good thing I’ve been through this before and I copied the document text itself and saved that to a text document just in case!
I tried 3 times to get the article to even save, to no success. I tried logging out and logging back in, I tried clearing cookies, I bloody tried everything to no change.
WTF? Yeah, to say I was annoyed was an understatement.
As I mentioned, I’ve had issues like this before, and one idea that came to mind was my security settings and the way the browser would work — I had previously had HTTPS forced on the site but recently disabled the forced HTTPS (not HTTPS as an option all together) to allow legacy systems to pull up the page.
Re-enabling that forced HTTPS did the trick – things worked again for posting on my main machine and after delaying the start of my day far longer than it should have I had the article published, but at a cost of legacy systems being able to access the site.
Why. Why is this the case? What got changed on the server or in my browser? Was this just Firefox? It’s recently had many privacy options “forced” active, and that could be enough to create a few issues with authentication with WordPress, maybe? Perhaps it was just a fluke and is actually fine now? Or it could be any other things. The point is, I haven’t a clue, but clearly forcing HTTPS solved the issue as it was at that time.
Do I have a point here? No, not really. I just enjoy writing about some of the issues that can happen when actively running such a website. Annoyances that just can’t be ignored and inevitably cause issues with how one wants to use their website and how they are forced to, if even just temporarily.
I’ll be looking into it more as time permits. For now, I just wanted to get this out there for the sake of it before the end of the day.