I really hate squishing bugs, both of the kinds I had to deal with today.

I spent most of the day trying to track down an elusive bug, either in my WordPress installation or at the web host's server. I was interrupted for a period when I had to chase down and destroy another kind of bug, a humongous cockroach. The dude was cruising down the upstairs hallway when I spotted him (or her or whatever). Roaches must sense when they're discovered because this one took off like a bat out of hell when he saw me. I finally got him with a walis (a Filipino broom).

Another bug was causing the link to manage comment subscriptions (Subscribe to Comments 2.1) to bring up an HTTP 406 error (not a valid resource) when anyone clicked on it. I didn't even know about it until Stephen Cronin (More Than Scratch the Surface) emailed me about it. I went through tons of code, looking for the offending culprit, and it was a complete waste of time. After searching for causes via Google, I finally nailed it down at the web host.

As I mentioned in my "Gray Matter Exercises #2" post, my web host break things. This time, it was caused by a free upgrade to my hosting service. Either they weren't using mod_security before that, or they turned it up a notch when they upgraded the servers. Following their instructions, I disabled it. Okay, so security's important, but how many other things stopped working because of it? I'd rather have a fully functional website and take a risk (I have new backups of everything, every day) than have a crippled, yet completely secure website. Anyway, I mentioned that my installation of Mint stopped working around that time. It turned out that it stopped working for the exact same reason: mod_security

I squished a final bug when I upgraded the CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin to the latest version. Some past comments were invisible due to the misuse of single and double quotes, an error that would only manifest itself if links were included in the comments. I fixed one comment manually and there's another one that I haven't fixed because I don't remember where it is. I'll be looking or it when I finish writing this.

Anyway, any website owner worth his or her salt has to take time out for squishing bugs once in awhile. Today just happened to be my day and I succeeded in squishing 3 bugs of both the software and insect varieties.