Blogger/Blogspot can’t detect WordPress RSS feed

So I just had an interesting problem where a Blogger/Blogspot blog I help maintain couldn’t detect the RSS feed of a WordPress blog I help maintain.

The error message was “Could not detect a feed for this URL”.

It turns out the problem was two-fold. First: One of the files in the WordPress theme added an empty line at the top of the RSS feed.

Second: I had to update a post on the WordPress blog because *something* in the entire chain was caching the RSS feed!

So, if you have the same problem, run your RSS file through a validator, check if there are any leading empty lines, and make sure to update some post to regenerate the feed to avoid caching.

Scrivener: Installation freezes up

I was testing the writing software Scrivener (for Windows), and ran into an issue. The installer would just freeze up completely on start. It would run, eat CPU time, and show up in the task list, but ultimately never showed any GUI.

Once it randomly worked, the application Scrivener itself had the same problem.

I then tried the Scrivener 3.0 Beta and it had the exact same issue.

Thanks to assistance from Scrivener’s support team, I was able to identify the cause: I had Wacom drivers dating from 2017 installed, as they were the latest for an old tablet I own. Uninstalling them solved the issue. The drivers for my current Wacom tablet do not interfere with Scrivener.

Hopefully, the Scrivener developers will fix this at some point, but until then: If you try to install or run Scrivener and it doesn’t work at all, make sure you do not have old Wacom drivers installed.

WordPress Images Not Showing

Another odd problem I had when migrating a WordPress blog to a new server is that some images would not display. It wasn’t that no image were showing; only some did not display. I have not found the root cause, but a solution.

It turns out that something happened to the thumbnails, i.e. resized versions of images. The easiest solution was to force WordPress to regenetate them.

For this, I used the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin by Alex Mills. Make sure to disable the option “Skip regenerating existing correctly sized thumbnails (faster).

After the plugin completed, all images were showing correctly again.

WordPress Redirect Loop

I’m currently in the process of migrating WordPress to a new server, and I made a somewhat silly mistake.

Basically, after setting up my virtualhost, wordpress, etc I ran into a redirect loop, where the site would always redirect from the actual name of my blog (“example.com”) to a signup page, and the signup page would then redirect to itself.

I was at my wits’ end, so I enabled debugging by adding:

define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

and changing this line to “true”:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

This creates a logfile called “debug.log” in your wp-content subdirectory.And lo and behold, it turns out I had forgotten to actually import my MySQL data.

18-Nov-2018 10:07:46 UTC] WordPress database error Table 'wordpress.wp_blogs' doesn't exist for query SELECT blog_id FROM wp_blogs WHERE domain IN ( 'blog.example.net' ) AND path IN ( '/wp-signup.php/', '/' ) ORDER BY CHAR_LENGTH(path) DESC LIMIT 1 made by require('wp-load.php'), require_once('wp-config.php'), require_once('wp-settings.php'), require('wp-includes/ms-settings.php'), ms_load_current_site_and_network, get_site_by_path, get_sites, WP_Site_Query->query, WP_Site_Query->get_sites, WP_Site_Query->;get_site_ids

I know how it happened – I redid my migration from scratch and took a break of a few days just before that step – and it’s unlikely someone else might run into this exact problem.

However, the steps to debug it are still valuable – had I done that in the first place, I might have saved myself quite a bit of time.

YouTube: Playback Stops with Spinning Loading Circle

For a couple of weeks I had a problem where YouTube playback stopped, and the video player would only display a spinning circle.
It turns out that this is a bug with the video player when Hardware Acceleration is enabled in Chrome (and possibly other browsers).

To turn off hardware acceleration, go to Menu –> Settings –> Advanced.

In the “System” section, find “Use hardware acceleration when available” and turn it off.

Seems to have fixed the problem for me so far, at the cost of higher CPU load.
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Skyrim: Wrye Bash “Wrye Bash could not find a game to manage. Please use -o command line argument to specify the game path”

After an update of Skyrim Special Edition, I got the following error message attempting to run Wrye Bash:

Wrye Bash could not find a game to manage. Please use -o command line argument to specify the game path

The solution was to run the game’s launcher – The update had removed the Skyrim SE settings. Normally, this is what you do anyway when you launch the game through Steam, but I am using SKSE and Nexus Mod Manager, which normally bypass the launcher.

eJabberd “Cannot read schema”

Trying to start ejabberd I got errors such as these:

2017-09-01 00:35:06.928 [error] <0.37.0> CRASH REPORT Process <0.37.0> with 0 neighbours exited with reason: {aborted,{“Cannot read schema”,”/var/lib/ejabberd/schema.DAT”,{error,{file_error,”/var/lib/ejabberd/schema.DAT”,eacces}}}} in application_master:init/4 line 133

Turns out I made a very simple mistake; I had attempted to start eJabebrd with “systemctl start ejabberd”. However, ejabberd brings its own control application. The correct way to start it is “ejabberctl start”.

Easy-RSA: “failed to update database”

Attempted to create a new certificate using the EasyRSA suite and got the following error:

“failed to update database”

Unfortunately the script is pretty laconic, but some quick testing showed this was due to trying to re-use the default display name:

Name [EasyRSA]:

Picked a different name and the script committed my certificate correctly.