You’ll notice iLind.net has a different look today.
That turned out to be the key to solving the mystery of the disappeared comments that surfaced over the past couple of days.
Credit for solving the mystery goes to Blaine Fergerstrom, who in the distant past was the webmaster who successfully launched Star-Bulletin.com online, a first in Hawaii at the time. He’s kept hundreds of web sites up and running, and he volunteered to take a look, plunging right into the guts of my WordPress installation.
In the end, the problem turned out to be pretty simple. Maintenance, or the lack thereof. Too much of the software that runs behind the scenes to operate a blog like this had gotten old and dated (like me, I suppose), and some parts no longer worked as they once had.
Meanwhile, WordPress, the background engine that powers the site, has been updated multiple times over several generations. And, no surprise, the old stuff started causing conflicts that threw off different symptoms, including locking up your comments.
Getting them back required changing to a new WordPress “theme,” the template that gives a blog like this its own look and feel, then updating or deleting various “plug-ins” that add features to the theme.
And that led to the realization that the whole “plan” for letting visitors find their way through 20 years of iLind.net posts and pictures hasn’t been updated either.
So over the next few days I might try out a few alternative themes and finally settle on one. Then I’ve got to figure out how to organize or reorganize all that’s here, along with the links to find the various moving parts.
Whew. I’m tired just trying to think through it!
Anyway, bear with me. There could very well be some glitches as I try to get all the parts to play well together.
