Have you ever noticed that when you decide to make big changes in your life that everything seems to fall apart? Well, this blog post is about just one area that has fallen apart. It happens that it directly affects my existing business.
Yeah, welcome to the chaos. That about covers it.
Hi, I’m Wayne. I’ve been working for myself online for several years and I decided in the last few months to revamp my online business. At first I thought I was just going to continue what I’ve been doing, just do it a lot better to generate a lot more income. It turns out that I’m going a lot bigger, and what I’m currently doing will just be a small contributing part to that.
Here’s the background. I have an online affiliate product business that I run through another website – GetMyWellness.com. The website is critical because it is how I get traffic to the products so that I make money. I use WordPress for the site because it is an easy way to create and publish content. But I used to work as a software developer, so I had to create a custom plugin to help build my pages. I wrote it several years ago just after WordPress released it’s Gutenberg block-style editor. If you work with WordPress then you are probably familiar with their block concept.
Back then I had a very basic understanding of Javascript and had never heard of React, the Javascript library that WordPress’s block development API is based on. I had no idea what I was doing, but I found enough examples of what I needed to be able to cobble something together that worked. The editor side was ugly, but it generated the html I needed to make the pages look like I wanted them to.
Then I left the plugin alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In the meantime, I did make some effort to get caught up on Javascript and learn what React is about. In case you don’t know, React was created by the Facebook developers to build Facebook.com. I’m hardly a pro, but I can look at some Javascript now and understand what it does for the most part.
Like everything else, WordPress releases periodic updates. It usually isn’t a big deal. Run the update then check a couple pages to make sure nothing went wrong. Nothing ever goes wrong, but you have to check just to be sure.
The Challenges
Well, WordPress released an update a few weeks ago and I installed it. But this time when I checked my pages it wasn’t good. At first it looked like only the CSS was missing (that’s what styles and formats the page) because the content was there but it was ugly. Looking deeper I found that my plugin was broken. There was more missing than just the CSS. WordPress changed something in their code that my plugin used. That isn’t terribly surprising. It has been several years and they figured out better ways of doing things. They did give people plenty of warning, but those warnings go to log files or to the Javascript console. Places that I don’t look unless I know that I need to, so I never saw them.
That was my first issue. It gets worse. I noticed another issue. I couldn’t click any of the checkboxes on the admin pages for my website. They are kind of important for selecting things in a list, like spam comments to delete or plugins to update. What could have changed that I can’t click a simple checkbox? After a little searching on the Internet I found out that I can check the box but I can’t see that it’s checked. I just have to trust it. WordPress did something for screen readers that my browser doesn’t support.
And here’s the root of my second issue. WordPress says that my browser is out date and will not support it anymore. Actually, my whole computer is out of date. I have a Retina 5K 27″ 2017 iMac that Apple no longer supports. That means I can’t update it to the current version of the operating system, or the current version of Safari. I also can’t get the latest version of TurboTax to do my taxes because Intuit isn’t supporting my ancient computer either, but that’s a next year problem.
I’m not getting a new Mac. I love my huge screen, but this was the last 27″ that Apple produced. They have also moved to some proprietary architecture that doesn’t support the 64 GB of RAM that I need to be able to play Minecraft with my son. So I’m sticking with this Mac. I can deal with invisible checkbox marks.
Or so I thought.
My plugin is the important thing and I need to fix it right away. I already have a test web server running on my computer so that I don’t bring down my live site while I’m working. The only other thing I need is a piece of software called Node that will install and run WordPress’s plugin development framework. I already have that because I used it for the original plugins and for playing with React over the years since. I just need to update it to the current version and I’m all set.
The most recent version of Node also does not support my aging Mac. Seriously? It’s just a script thing. Why?
I’m stuck. I cannot fix my website with my current computer. One option could be to get rid of my plugins and create the custom HTML like I used to do, but that would take a lot of time and create maintenance nightmares down the road. I need to fix this plugin.
A Solution?
I’m not going with Mac, so how about a shiny new Windows laptop? Yes, it’s a smaller screen, but I’m not getting rid of my Mac, so it’s more like an extra screen. And the laptop supports a reasonable amount of memory and is portable. My iMac is definitely not portable. Everything is looking up now. This should work.
Or not. The new laptop plays fancy new computer games without an issue but crashes when I try to run the development environment. I don’t think I’m using anything as graphically intensive as the games are. I installed localWP for a development web and database server, Node to create the WordPress plugin skeleton, and Visual Studio Code to actually write my plugins.
It was a nightmare. I can play Space Engineers for hours without a problem, but crash as soon as I start VSCode. One day I lost a few hours trying to recover when localWP crashed on startup and trashed it’s configuration file. I hade to uninstall it, delete the remains because uninstall doesn’t remove everything for some reason, then reinstall it and setup my development website all over again. This is when I learned that I should back up everything frequently. Windows wasn’t working for me here. I need something stable, something that I don’t have to worry about crashing on me in the middle of my work.
What other options do I have? How about Linux? I like Linux. I learned computing on Unix systems when I was in college, and Linux is really Unix for a PC. This is when I found out how difficult modern PCs are to deal with, especially graphics cards, and why I like my Mac so much.
I’m going to save the gory details for another post because this one is getting long, but to summarize…
Linux comes in a lot of flavors. At it’s core it is an open source operating system, but there are many companies who bundle it up with various tools and stuff. First I tried Ubuntu which is very popular and has been around for a long time, but something didn’t work. Then I tried Fedora. It worked well enough to get it installed, but it crashed a lot too at first. The nice thing about Linux is that you can upgrade and downgrade individual pieces of your operating system much more easily than you can with Windows. And you don’t need to at all with Mac, just saying.
It took some time, and I will go into everything I had to do later, but I now have a stable system to work with and my plugin is ready for some thorough testing before I install it on my website. Look for my next posts if you are interested in all of the hurdles I went through to end up with a laptop that will run both Windows 11 (I like Space Engineers) and Fedora Linux and get my plugin updated and greatly improved from what it was. Apparently there is also a non-Apple-supported way to get my Mac updated too.
Thanks for reading.
To be continued…