Software Makes My Head Hurt

Instead of "Software Makes My Head Hurt", I wanted to used an alliterative title, just 2 words – Software _ _ _ _ _, but I don’t like that expression, even though it would be vastly appropriate to convey the type of situation I was dealing with all morning.

Now that I’ve got you thoroughly confused, welcome to the club. I’ve been that way all morning. (No comments about how I’m that way ALL the time please.)

I was working on my websites and suddenly realized that the buttons for subscribing to different feeds that should be in the sidebar of the home page were missing from more than half of them.

Why???

I checked the Wordpress plug-in that’s supposed to generate these buttons and put them in the sidebar. It was there on all the sites, same version, all activated. But it wasn’t working on 3 out of 5 sites.

Why???

I checked the code. It was the same for the sites with and without the buttons.. I checked it was the same versions of Wordpress. I checked… oh never mind what all I checked. If you’re not into this stuff, you wouldn’t understand it anyway. I’m working on it, but that doesn’t mean I really understand it either.

So I got someone up here who understands it better than I do. He informed me he doesn’t know .php very well. I informed him however well he understands it, it’s a whole lot better than I do.

He spent half the morning working on it. He worked on the desktop computer while I worked on the laptop. We poked around in code all over the place, trying to find the problem. We tried to figure out what was different about the sites. We tried to find documentation on the plug-in. We looked on forums. We tried everything we could think of between the two of us to fix the problem so this plug-in would work.

But we never did figure out why this particular plug-in wouldn’t work on over half the sites.

Finally, I asked Jonathan where the code was on the sites that DID work, and can we input in manually? Yeah, we could. Well, how about the graphics, can we add them too? Oh yeah, he knew were to find the graphics too.

The upshot is yes, we could input the code manually. And guess what? It didn’t take but 5 minutes to fix it on each site so that the feeds are now showing up in the sidebar WITHOUT that blasted “helpful” plug-in.

That’s technology for you. Great when it works, a pain when it doesn’t. And sometimes, it’s just easier to do it yourself than to try some great and wonderful time-saving device that isn’t a great and wonderful time-saving device after all. We wasted more time trying to make this time-saver work than it took to do it ourselves.

That’s why sometimes I use a pencil and paper instead of the computer.