Unknown to me the primary blog has been down all day because of a Mantra theme problem in WordPress.
When I got in from my roadtrip, around 5ish, I checked the NAS and the servers; every component was up and running and looking good.
I validated the webservices by checking the geekblog and it looked and responded normally.
I checked my main blog and was surprised to see a blank page. Nothing. Just a big slab of visual white noise.
I checked the MySQL database and it looked good and responded to a dummy query normally.
I checked the WordPress admin page and it came back straight away. But as well as the usual admin things, it displayed an error message I hadn’t seen before:
So something, somewhere, was telling the database to pull a theme (or, importantly, a part of a theme) from a directory that didn’t exist (and no theme directory has ever been located in ‘(‘ as far as I’m aware).
So I switched to the current view (had to knock up a header with text, based on the old header I made for Mantra).
Now I could just reinstall Mantra (and I may well end up doing that), but I’m a bit fed up with the issues I’ve been having with the blog theme.
I’ve just upgraded WordPress from 3.7.1 to 3.8.
Then, mindful of the last bunch of errors, I ran a feed validation against the blog’s self-generating RSS feed and the Feedburner RSS feed.
Both passed (with the same YouTube-related minors).
Very curious.
I need to think about this.
In the meantime I’m going to leave the design on the temporary version, while I ponder.