Don't panic !! It's only a picture of one I caught earlier.

I apologise if you were affected by the recent bug encountered by some visitors when they accessed this site. The bug caused some desktop PC user’s to see the mobile and PDA version of JournalXtra. It was caused by a plugin update and the issue has now been resolved.

For those who want a little more information, the plugin is called WPtouch iPhone Theme and is designed to switch visitors with mobile phones and PDAs to a site theme specifically designed for them. It hasn’t affected any of my other Wordpress blogs so it will be related to a configuration setting.

I knew about the update but didn’t catch the bug until I visited the site as a non administrator. I will keep it disabled until it is next updated. Hopefully, the issue will be fixed then; if not, I will re-activate it and play with its settings.

Now the plugin is deactivated, visitors who access JournalXtra through a PDA, mobile phone or iPhone will get the regular theme which can appear a little bloated to them. I apologise to you if this is an inconvenience to you. Use the RSS feed if you really do want to see the non-aesthetically pleasing site version.

Normal mobile, PDA and iPhone service will resume shortly.

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I had a shock today. In fact, I was terrified, livid and exasperated by what happened to me today: I lost a very long Wordpress article that I have been working on for several months; or, at least, I thought I had lost it.

I made a few edits and added some new details to the 140 Mafia Guide, saved it and viewed it to see that the article displayed as I wanted. Only, it wasn’t there to be seen. The comments were still visible but the article was, well, gone! I felt sick. I’ve spent ages working on The Guide, adding internal links and changing the layout to make it more user friendly. I wanted to rip my computer from its socket, throw it at a wall, jump all over it, pour petrol on it and burn it. I knew it wasn’t my computer’s fault that the article had disappeared but I just wanted to vent some anger.

Fortunately, I’m not so daft as to bite my own nose off to spite my face. I kept my cool and made sure the article had saved – which it had; I checked that it was still listed in my dashboard – which it was; then I checked whether it could be seen in the category view – it could. It turned out that the direct page that displayed The Guide was the only place where it could no longer be seen. Calming down a bit, I realised that this disappearing trick must have something to do with a maximum limit on the number of characters that a post (or article) can contain after which it becomes undisplayable.

A quick Google proved me right. It’s a PHP issue that’s easily fixed by editing wp-config.php in the main Wordpress folder to add


ini_set('pcre.recursion_limit',20000000);
ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit',10000000);


to the top of it just bellow <?php

So if ever you write a long article and find you can’t post it or it isn’t visible after you have posted, don’t jump around like a lunatic, just insert those two lines of code at the top of your wp-config.php file.

Thank you Otto42 at Wordpress for posting the solution here.

Just a little gripe I have with some of the Wordpress themes created by some of those amazing designers out there (hope you like the customizations I’ve made to this one :) ).

Some theme designers forget to provide the option to have the comment dialogue box auto expand at the end of articles. Not a problem when there’s a button stating “add comment here” but it is a problem when there isn’t such a button or when busy visitors are too much in a rush to look for such a button. Think about it, do you look for a comment box or do you look for a “add comment” button?

After a little bit of searching I found the code edits needed to make the comment box always visible for Wordpress articles; and I must say thank you to Sheila Hoff for posting the solution in the Wordpress support forum (I’ve linked to your homepage in gratitude).

Here’s what you need to do to automatically expand Wordpress comments:

• Go to your Dashboard, find where it says Appearance in the sidebar on the left-hand-side then select Editor,
• On the right-hand-side of the newly opened page, you will see a new list of files; select the one that says Main Index Template or index.php
• In the editor window you will see text that starts with <?php followed by more text. Look for a line that says <?php get_header(); ?> and add <?php $withcomments = 1 ?> onto a new line below it,
• Now check through this page for any line of text that might say <?php comments_template(); ?> (my template already had it in it). If it isn’t present then find <?php endwhile; else: ?> and above it, on a line of its own, add <?php comments_template(); ?> .

So the top might then look like:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php $withcomments = 1 ?>

And somewhere toward the bottom it will then look like

<?php comments_template(); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>

You will find it easy to search index.php if you copy it into a text editor, press ctrl+f then type your search terms.