I’ve been using Twitter a lot more recently (@beagooddad). I recently heard about the TwitThis WordPress plugin which lets people click on a button at the end of your post and automatically Tweet the link to their Twitter account. Sounded fun so I installed it.
Everything seemed to work fine when I added it to a few blogs (including my wife’s). I viewed one of my posts and sent a Tweet to test it and everything was great.
A few days later, my wife complained that her home page looked funky and asked if I was messing around again. On the homepage, all of the posts just showed up as titles. All of the content was missing.
Here are the steps I took to figure out what was not working.
- Upgrade to the most recent WP. I figured if I was going to need support at some time, I should be on the current release. Fortunately, I already was.
- Upgrade all plugins to their most recent versions. I did that and still had the problem.
- Upgrade the theme to the most recent version. I use the Thesis WordPress Theme. I upgraded to the most recent 1.5 version.
- Deactivate all plugins and reload homepage. After this step, the homepage loaded fine. So, I realized I had a plugin problem.
- Activate the plugins one at a time. When I got to the TwitThis plugin, the home page went back to titles only.
- Deactivate all plugins and then just activate the problem plugin. I wanted to make sure the issue was with the plugin and not some conflict between two plugins. After this step, I still had the titles only problem.
So then I reactivated all of my plugins except TwitThis and sent an email to their support email address with all of the relevant information (WP version 2.7.1 – Thesis version 1.5 and 1.4.2 – also didn’t work on the WordPress Classic theme) and told them to let me know if they wanted any other info. I also volunteered to test a new release if they make one that addresses the problem.
Unfortunately, the email bounced back with an error saying:
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.7.17)
(state 14).
I couldn’t find any other contact information on their page, so for now the best I can do is write a post and hope they find it when they do a vanity search.
Anyway, the point of this is more to document the steps you can take when something strange happens to your blog and you don’t notice for a couple days and you don’t remember what you could have changed that might have caused the problem.
Also, if TwitThis ever does find the problem, I’m still more than willing to try to provide more info and test the new release.
