We’ve Got Some Issues

If you’ve spotted the widget in the sidebar, you already know the gist of what I’m getting into here. Since the switch to Shoreditch, a number of outstanding issues have lingered even as I’ve settled one or two. It’s worth going into a little more detail on each of those that remain.

• Before the switch, the year archive pages had a description up top similar to that on the source archive pages. The latter simply is the taxonomy description which I’d previously set to use shortcodes, which is how I get the total post count and total word count for each source. Date archives, of course, do not have anything resembling the taxonomy description and so I’ve been trying and failing to get ChatGPT to figure this out for me, but it keeps getting the context wrong, and so the counts are wrong.

• There is a bug in Jetpack’s support for using Markdown in the Classic Editor that either is relatively new or somehow went unnoticed previously, wherein the first paragraph in a multi-paragraph list item is not actually given a <p> element, even though the successive paragraphs do. I can’t do anything about this. Jetpack has to fix this themselves. I did open an issue, and it’s been seen, but for them it’s obviously not a mission-critical bug.

• My custom code to display what I call pseudo-titles for untitled posts, which in Shoreditch mainly is useful for outputting something in <title>, currently fails in the On This Day widget, but only in the contexts of single posts and archive pages. This is not a fault with the plugin for this widget, and in fact the authors very quickly made a change to it in order for my custom code to work at all. The issue here is that since I suppress the pseudo-title on untitled posts and in post lists, if the widget is appearing on a single post or an archive page the pseudo-title doesn’t appear in the widget, either. So far, ChatGPT has had no success figuring this out.

• You might have run into an error page recently indicating that the site couldn’t establish a database connection. This was the result of an out of memory error on my VPS crashing the database server. I’m basically on a barebones droplet here, and rather than immediately rushing to reconsider my budget and resize the droplet I’ve created a swap file and will continue monitor the situation.

As far as I know, these are the only outstanding issues that remain to be addressed or solved. If you hit or notice any others, just drop me an email and I’ll either fix them or add them to the list.