I'll tell you...
I have been having a problem with mt WordPress blog lately. the theme was broken. I had gone through a bunch of stuff and made an extra bald spot trying to figure out what the deal was. I'm not a rank beginner, either. I have broken my blog more than once... and put it back together every time.
But this time was different. I had actually broken it twice... I just hadn't noticed. I don't look at the front of my blog every day when I am in a hurry.
So, my normal fixes weren't working.
- Disabled all of the plug-ins to make sure it wasn't a conflict there... no change.
- Unpublished each blog post on the front page to see if something on a post was breaking the theme... no change.
- Disabled each of the sidebars to see if it was something there... no change.
- Killed several widgets looking for the guilty party breaking the theme... no change.
That was my bag of tricks.
So, I put the call out on Twitter. Within a few minutes, @MikeMueller and @youragentmike were both on my site and looking for solutions. A few minutes later I got an email from @garaughty. Shortly after that came a direct message from @Cyberhomes (Reggie Nicolay). There was even some moral support from @tinainvirginia.
Marti (@garaughty) had the solution. I hadn't broken the theme with one post... I'd done it with two. Unpublishing each post hadn't worked because the theme was broken from two posts. I unpublished all of the posts on the front page and re-published them one at a time... and found a problem, then another. It was reasonably simple, I had open '<div>' tags on the two posts. That meant that the theme was getting the wrong signal after the posts were truncated.
But think about this for a minute... within 5 minutes, I had 5 people looking at my problem and trying to help. These are folks that know about WordPress and they were setting aside their own work to help.
So, what good is social networking? You tell me...
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