WordPress is a challenge for me. I can do HTML coding. I can manage CSS with a cheat sheet. I can even hack the code in Blogger with instructions and have everything work right, but WordPress? It’s a problem for me and I can only do the bare minimum with it.
It is the blog I use on my website, but my web designer set it up, and I just update it. That’s easy enough to do. Although I swear, there are times that’s a challenge, too.
So in a fit if idiocy, I decided to put WordPress on a secondary website I have. I posted my house pictures on it, but haven’t done anything else with the site, and since I’m paying for it, I decided I might as well get more mileage out of it. My ingenious plan (snort) was to do a photo gallery of pictures for my Works In Progress and password protect the blog so that no one could look at it. Why? Copyright.
The photographers hold the copyright on their images, and if I expect people to respect my copyright on my books, I need to respect others’ copyrights as well. Plus, after seeing scammy advertisers on Facebook who used images of Oprah and other celebrities without permission, I didn’t want to publically post these pictures without permission from the models as well. And since I have no plans to hunt these people down (model or photographer), that means I need to keep them private, for my own use only.
It seemed simple enough. WordPress has a bazillion plug-ins and I’d just find one to secure the blog part of the site and it would all be good.
Not!
The first solution I read about left the pictures open to indexing. Which totally negates my entire reason for the blog. The second involved hacking the code and uploading a file. I did the file part all right, but the hack was written for an older version of WP and the folder they said to put the hack isn’t in my list of files. I opened one that looked kind of close, but decided I wasn’t brave enough to try it.
That led to option three. A plug-in that would require a sign-in. Exactly what I wanted. I had to upload the plug-in since it wasn’t in the database (that worked!), but the plug-in wouldn’t let me into my own blog even when I signed in. I deactivated it. Then I tried solution four. Another WordPress plug-in. This one didn’t work either. Apparently, I don’t have PHP 5.2 or higher. Still no blog.
Today, I found another possible solution. This would be number five. It’s another plug-in and I’ll try it out later, when I have a little more time. If this one doesn’t work, I’m going to have to wait until I make my deadline because I really don’t have time to mess around with this right now.
My problems with WordPress… Sigh. It’s challenging my geek status and I don’t like it.
Tags: adventures, wordpress
Sorry to year about your troubles.
But . . .
If your webhost is not on PHP 5.2 or higher, you need to get them to upgrade you. There are some serious security holes in lower versions and, IRC, PHP 4 is no longer officially unsupported. Hopefully, your host is providing more than PHP4.
One option would be to password protect your WordPress directory at the file level. How you do that will depend on whether you're on a windows server or a unix/linix server, but your host should have a file manager app that will allow you to require a password for access to a certain directory.
All of which you can consider when you are done with the current project.
Thanks, Carolyn! I can't even figure out how to tell which version of php my host is running. I'm losing my geek credentials fast.
I did manage to get the blog secured with a plug-in. Finally.
Patti