DIY is Fixing Your Blog

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by PetitPlat – Stephanie Kilgast (in dolly mood)

Anyone who does stuff knows you do stuff by doing it.

Eh?

Last night while I was visiting Alec Couros he asked me why there was no image in the right side of the header of my blog. Hmmm, maybe it is your browser, Alec? Nope, Chrome and Safari and Firefox were giving me a grey box too.

Maybe it was the caching on my blog- deleted it.

Nope.

Now it is looking grim, maybe it is time to shop for another theme template.

30 minutes looking at other themes, and then contemplating all of the custom things I have hung on this one.

Then I looked at the Developer console in chrome and noticed an error flag on something related to “href$=.mp3” That looked like something related to the WP-Audio plugin I use to convert links to MP3 files to an audio player, or as I blogged earlier, a “non crappy WordPress audio player”.

Deactivating the plugin did not fix the situation.

Digging deeper, I looked back to the WordPress page for the plugin– quite a few bug reports of the plugin being broken. That is what I was seeing- it did nothing at all, did not render the audio player from a hyperlink.

Then I followed one link from a problem report to what turned out to be the fix — I had to edit a file within the plugin, chainging wpaudio.min.js to edit href$=.mp3 and replace with href$=”.mp3″.

This fixed the audio player… and now my banner images (also JavaScript) too were appearing. So the error caused in the plugin stopped execution so the player for the slide show never loaded.

One thing leads to another, but I only found the answer by trying a few things, and following some reasonable trails, not just by wild googling.

Actually I just wanted to let anyone know who uses the WP-Audio plugin about this fix since it is a post here that gets a good number of views.

But also, it was my only confirmation of the joys of digging into (and out of) a tech problem.

I did this one DIM.

If you do not want to tinker with code editing, I have a copy of the updated wpaudio.min.js file you can download and replace in your plugin area.