Down the Rabbit Hole

At the start of the day today, I decided to shift gears a bit. Lately, I’ve been trying to brush up on JavaScript and CSS… but took a break today to work on a personal project that’s been backburnered, due to the job situation.

That’s right – my way of relaxing? Working on a WordPress site. Sometimes, you literally have to pull the lampshade off my head.

When I first started this side project, I was developing server-side. Old habit, and I hadn’t really figured out how to do things locally on my machine yet. A few weeks ago, I got MAMP installed… and so I thought I’d stop working “live” on the project, and pull it down to my machine. I figured – hey, might be a good opportunity to practice LESS a bit, as a bonus.

While I’ve figured out how to set up regular WP sites locally, getting a multisite set up was a bit trickier. After some finagling, I got things working… and then went about exporting/importing all my existing pages and entries. And all my Gravity Forms data.

Spent the next few hours tracking down various path issues related to working locally. Ended up hitting a small roadblock when I couldn’t load up video content (which was a bit baffling). Finally figured out I needed to install Jetpack, so that I could use shortcode embeds.

But then I ran into a problem because Jetpack threw an error, saying that it needed to be installed on a public, query-able site. And so I had to go research how to tweak the plugin and trick it into thinking I was online and publicly available.

You can see how most of my day went. One little thing led to another, and to another, and so on…

As of now, it’s close to 8PM and I don’t have a ton to show for my day. I mean, I sort of do… but most of my time involved setup and migration. Kind of feels like spending all day prepping for a big meal, but never getting the chance to cook.

I guess, if nothing else, I learned a good deal today. And the next time I need to set up a multisite WP install locally, I’ll hopefully be a bit faster.

[CC photo via Paul Beattie]