Back in the old days, The American Jerk was nothing but a bunch of plain old HTML files. Which was simple in it’s own way, but every update required going into an HTML editor to create the new pages, rebuild the old pages to add new links and maintain the taxonomy, and re-uploading the entire increasingly complex and snarled mess of files up to the server via old-school FTP. To coin a filthy metaphor (old days or no, why change now?), updating it was a lot like trying to bone Andi McDowell in Groundhog Day: every time I had the urge for a new piece it felt like I had to meet, court and lie to her all over again before she’d give up the goods.
This, however, is the 21st Century, meaning that this crappy little rag is run by WordPress: a database-driven piece of content management software that lives on my server, handles all the relationships, links, look and feel of the site so that all I have to do is write. Which is great on paper; to stick with the metaphor, it’s like having a girl with whom all the courting should be over… but in reality, WordPress is sometimes a cruel, fickle, unthinking bitch who won’t give it up no matter what I try or how long I try it. Much like, well, trying to bone Andi McDowell in Groundhog Day.
Six days ago I put together a piece, tried to log into my own fucking Web site… and got a 500 Server Error. And based on the number of things I tried to fix it and times I tried to log in, I think the 500 stood for the number of times the Server intended to kick me in the crotch and giggle at me. It reached the point after several days where I finally had to admit defeat and call my Server company to open a technical service ticket… and mark my words: by 2050, hack female stand-up comics across America will be doing jokes about how their husbands refuse to just stop and ask to open a technical service ticket. These jokes will be met by puzzled stares, since men will be too busy with their silastic-skinned, semi-autonomous reactive Hentaiplicants to consider marriage. One of these will jeopardize the future of humanity as a race. The other involves fucking robots.
Anyway, after a day or so, the nice people at my Web host figured out the problem, finally getting me to the point where, when I tried to log in… the login page reloaded. This, at least, was behavior I’ve seen before: it happens because of WordPress plugins. Plugins are little pieces of code made by hobbyists you can easily embed into your Web site to make it look prettier. So if WordPress is a woman, plugins are breast implants… made by people you’ve never met in countries you’d never visit filled with things that would make you sick under conditions that would horrify you. Further, it seems that many of these people believe that “Software Quality Assurance” is something that you get for an extra hundred bucks at high-end Reno brothels (or for fifty if you bring your own Nerf Wang).
So I got that taken care of and went to the Write Post screen, only to find that the editor that allows me to write in simple English had been crippled, forcing me to write in HTML… which is precisely what I went through all this technical shit to avoid. After fruitlessly Googling the problems for two hours, I got onto the live chat with a service rep at my Web host:
>>My simple English editor in WordPress been borked. What did you people do?
>>I’m looking at your FTP file structure, and it appears that we changed permissions on the folders and files needed for that to work.
>>WHAT? Why would you DO that? It’s MY Web site!
>>We did it for security purposes, sir.
>>Well, I guess unilaterally changing MY Web site to make it unusable makes it pretty Goddamned secure. OK: what do I do to fix it?
>>I’m going to need you to pull up and adjust your CHMOD.
>>Hold on there, sailor: if you’re gonna make me that proposition, shouldn’t you be pulling up to me in a van and offering me candy?
>>Sir, CHMOD is the method for setting file permissions in Unix.
>>I KNOW what CHMOD is, Flapjack. I just figured that if you’re going to make a habit out of treating me like a helpless child and fucking me while my back is turned, we should settle on a common terminology.
However, the kinks are now worked out, and The American Jerk is again open for business until the next crippling server failure. Which means that later today or tomorrow, a piece about Letterman’s airing of Bill Hicks’s last network comedy performance will be up, but in the meantime to hold yourself over: do yourself a favor and check out Ann The Anvil’s four-part recap of the Sundance Film Festival. For regular readers of this cesspit who aren’t familiar: it seems Sundance is like Comic-Con except it’s about movies instead of comic books. And instead of Naruto, apparently people dress like contemptible Eurotrash with Daddy’s ATM card.
[tags]WordPress, dark humor, satire[/tags]
