It’s been in my planner for months: get back to blogging. So when I finally sat down last night to blog I was dismayed to see my WordPress website totally inaccessible, displaying a 503 error:
Note: since this is self hosted, yours truly is the aforementioned Technical Support department.
Not to be blocked there, I asked Claude.ai a bit back and forth, gave up, and wrote a short draft of something in Google docs I could later post here. But it just didn’t have the same feel with the site being down. So, newly motivated to procrastinate and sitting down at a computer, I decided to tackle a long postponed project to use the Tesla API to track when my husband will be home for dinner (with his permission of course). There is nothing better for productivity than procrastinating one project with another!
This time the Vibes were Good. I drafted an initial stab with Claude.ai, then migrated to Visual Studio code to polish with my bud Copilot. I logged in and was able to debug some errors related to there actually being two cars on the account (we are indeed a two Tesla family) and the cars being asleep while parked (thus unreachable by API), all with the help of my Copilot friend. I then changed the GPS coordinates to google maps links, and if I was close enough to my home GPS just displayed at home.
Nice distraction. But my WordPress still did not work, and my bedtime had arrived.
Tonight after much motivational to-and-froing I sat down again, this time determined to fix the error. I went to my hosting provider and verified I could access the domain via cPanel. I tried googling this time, and did a stab at disabling plugins by renaming the plugin folder in the cPanel and trying to access the plugin admin. Finally I broke down and used the hosting provider’s AI chat, which did end up working out well to my surprise. Hello, domain context (literally!).
It recommended I check the stats of the host and sure enough I had gone over the limit of file count. Moving to the trash didn’t work (because that would create a file – doh!), but there was an option to bypass the trash and I managed to delete enough to get the site back up, and here you find me. I’ll know what to do next time, and maybe Claude will get the hint too so someone else will as well.
And now I’ve satisfied my goal to write a blog for the week. It turns out all you have to do to get me REALLY interested in writing a blog is make it very hard to access my blogging site such that I have a fun little puzzle to solve which to procrastinate upon I must do a small side programming quest. Maybe I should build that in as a productivity hack to access my WordPress going forward!