Offline

As some may have noticed, my weblog has been for the last two days offline. Well, maybe offline is not completely correct. The site was running, but not in a proper way. Visitors only saw blanc pages.

So what happened? For a certain update I wanted (and needed) to do on the weblog a newer version of PHP was required. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is the scripting/programming language that was used to create Word Press. And Word Press is the software package that I use for my weblog.
So I contacted the company that hosts my weblog what the best way would be to do this. They suggested to move the complete weblog to a new server in their data-center with the newest version of PHP and other software (as MySQL) installed. That sounded as a good plan.

My provider moved the site and mailed me that all the was done, but that it could take some hours for the site to be reachable again.

But sadly the site didn’t come available again. Well, it showed only blanc pages. It was Marissa who noticed it the first and sent a mail to me.

It turned out the a rather old plugin was not compatible with PHP v7.* and that caused any page to show as a blanc page.
Luckily this plugin that caused the problem was not an important plugin and could easily replaced by one that almost did the same.

The trick I used to solve it was renaming the plugin-directories (“askimet” to “askimet.old” as example. Renaming the directories will deactivated the plugins automatically. By renaming the directories one by one to the original name and reload the website in a browser will show fast which plugin caused the problem.

Anyway, all is working as normal again and now the weblog is running with PHP version 7.1.2 and MySQL version 5.7.17. And that was the goal I was after.

And oh, the new server that is running the website is really faster 🙂