jhaber31

Thanks so much again to the moderator for the help as well as the patience. I stretched this out over a day and missed the simple step of the save button. This definitely works.

Let me ask one last question. For static pages in my hold directory, I’d a menu with links to the blog before. Now they’ll be links simply home. Is the preferred syntax for that href=”./” or href=”/”? I realize I could specify href=”index.php,” but I remember the relative link as more economical.

Henkholland, that’s the setup I’m trying for yes. I was trying to debug what went wrong and, then, to understand the advice about updating permalinks to fix it. I shall try today and update status here, thanks.

Thanks. Under permalinks I just have the checkbox for “Month and name.” So I go to “custom structure” and add “/blog” at the head of the URL?

Oh, just to clarify. First, when I said I was restoring index.php to /blog, the error page I was seeing said that index.html (or that and a few other choices) was missing.

Second, when I said I got the worst of both worlds, I see one of my mistakes. I deleted index.html from the copy of files on my computer, but not online. (Sorry!) That’s why the splash screen showed. (I guess index.html has priority over index.php.)

That still leaves the question of why I then was seeing that no posts matched my criteria once the blog page successfully loaded its template, with colors, menus, and so on.

Ouch. So far I’m getting the worst of both worlds. If I go to my URL, https://www.haberarts.com/, then it plays the old splash screen anyhow, and then if I go to the blog as before, it correctly displays the template but says no posts match my criteria! I’m going to have to revert for a while until I can get more help or figure out what went wrong.

Thanks. I’m going to restore a version of index.php to the blog directory, because I’m getting an error message without it. Will check back soon.

While you’re being so helpful, can I anticipate some problems? I examined the WordPress index.php file in the blog directory. It’s quite simple (in fact, much simpler than my index.html file in the root).

Thus, first, after copying it into the root and editing it, I assume I delete it from the blog directory? Second, I assume I delete index.html, so there will be no index.html file in the root? And third, I assume I don’t try to alter it further to make up for some of the functionality of my existing index file, such as meta tags within head tags? (These are specified in WordPress templates, I see.) Thanks, John

Thanks very much. I think I mostly follow. In effect, several of the steps won’t be necessary, since WordPress ALREADY has its own directory. If I’m guessing right, that means that steps 1-3, 6, 10, and 11 won’t be needed by other steps will. But I’ll play around, and this sounds like a good guide to get me started. — John

Michael, may I try my question differently, based on more experience? Again, the blog lives in a blog folder, while my site has other pages in the root folder, as well as images there. Suppose I wish to link from the blog to other pages and include those images in the blog.

I tried using “../filename” for both href and src. Now, if I went to preview a post, links were all wrong (about two folders too deep) and images did not appear. However, if I went to the blog itself, the links were all fine, although it took changing the src to ../../../filename. So we’ve three kinds of paths handled differently. Then, to my surprise, if I went to the blog’s “previous” page (of older posts), the links were dead again, although with a different path. Can you help explain how the syntax is parsed four different ways, so that I can better know how to fix things? Thank you.

Wait, I have a clue: When I look at the theme choices that I could upload, the choice of classic theme has changed, offering me instead the classic theme as modified by me. Presumably it’s recognizing the stylesheet from the comment field at top of the css file, and I’d put in that note. So somehow, it can’t find the theme because some of the indicators it has aren’t matching. Not that I know how to change this. Maybe if I back up the header, footer, and sidebar, then try to install the classic theme from the WP site and ftp those three back, then worry later about how to modify the stylesheet again.

Thanks. I guess I just hadn’t used ids in my past work (except sometimes with both name and id attributes in an a tag for jump links) and was rusty at CSS, although I’d be surprised indeed if I entered any invalid syntax. As I say, my own code was on the whole much simpler and had been reliable enough for a while. But anyway, while I can now better parse the stylesheet I have, I still have this serious error to resolve that was the main question.

I should add that since then I get the error message in trying to use the dashboard’s template error, so it’s not going to be easy to repair unless I can ftp a backup copy of the css file from somewhere. On the other hand, my test blog page displays as expected (with some of the changes I tried to make to the stylesheet, in fact).

Thanks. I got in touch with my domain host, and they may have solved it by resetting the link to the database server.

First, apologies that I had typos. I realize that a single dot is for current directory, two dots for parent. It’s just that the two dots aren’t working: they either give me a URL with dots in it (if I use code view in a test post) or are simply dropped, giving me a link to a URL within the blog. (Sorry again, in that my second URL, with the dog between “blog” and “filename,” was also my error.)

But here, two things about your solution. First, be aware that I don’t want a link like the one you gave: those filenames live in the parent, not in the blog. The links I’m getting automatically by omitting http and my domain are exactly to within the blog, which is wrong. Second, are you saying, then, that I should give the full URL each time? A real shame, since that’s a lot of typing (and I imagine slower access for users). Also, currently, I work often in a bare-bones html editor (an old, old version of Homesite) that lets me chose a link from my file list, and then it’d turn up without the http and domain as well.

What a drag. I guess WP basically disallows some html syntax?