glenf

My service provider was able to track down the problem. A simple fix (probably because of a PHP incompatibility?)… In wp-includes/taxonomy.php, remove the cast to “object”, on lines 11-13:

$wp_taxonomies = array();
$wp_taxonomies['category'] = array('name' => 'category', 'object_type' => 'post', 'hierarchical' => true, 'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count');
$wp_taxonomies['post_tag'] = array('name' => 'post_tag', 'object_type' => 'post', 'hierarchical' => false, 'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count');
$wp_taxonomies['link_category'] = array('name' => 'link_category', 'object_type' => 'link', 'hierarchical' => false);

Also, I know I have to update my SQL collection and character sets to be UTF-8, but I don’t think this is related to the above problem (is it?). Everything I read on www.remarpro.com about fixing the special characters seemed to suggest you perform the upgrade first, then fix the SQL database.

By the way, with Firefox I don’t get any error messages, but the returned page is empty (0 bytes). This is for wp-admin/upgrade.php, index.php, etc.

Thanks to all, as you see I was solving my own problem as you guys were also. Geez, you folks are fast! Thanks again, now I’m sorted.

Oops, one other piece of info I just discovered, which really helps (why does one not discover these things until after carefully sending the question?). I had tried running it in Firefox but it just forwarded me over to Safari for the feed. But I changed the “feed” to “http” and got this message, which probably tells all (for one of you!)…

XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Location: https://blog.tenuousconnections.com/index.php/feed/
Line Number 3, Column 1:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^

Seems I do have a plugin that is putting whitespace at the start of the file. But if I deactivated my plugins it still remains. (A few minutes later…) Okay, I need to do that and then also clear my cache, then it works. Sorry for the trouble — luckily I also discovered this post that also solves the problem (except for the extra bit of cache clearing again.