Mailbag: Debugging .Com

From Wesley:

It’s a one-word question though so I hope it won’t take you too long: my blog is free, which means it’s a .com, not .org [redacted] so I cannot install plugins, right? And an even quicker follow up, there’s no hope for me to erase post revisions so to free space and upload a page that’s over 200K words and refuses to do so, is there? Thank you so much for your attention. Cheers

Your site is hosted on wordpress.com so you can’t install plugins (or themes). Even on VIP you can’t, though they may do it for you. It’s a Multisite thing.

Also you can’t erase post revisions, but you also don’t need to worry about that. It’s not why you can’t upload a page of over 200k words. That’s just WP timing out. I’m assuming it’s hanging and timing out… Hard to know for sure without a description of the error.

Sadly, since it’s on .com and I don’t work for them, you will have to ask how to handle that here: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/

My suggestion would be split the post into multiple posts. I’ve found people rarely read a post longer than 1500 words. If it was a self hosted WordPress, I’d tell you that you should check the PHP error logs, and see if it’s a PHP timeout (which would be my guess) or something else like a mod_security error. If it’s PHP, there’s not a lot you can do unless you’re on a VPS or better, but really ‘adding more PHP memory’ is not the best move.

Storing massive amounts of data is slow. 200k in a post is huge. If you were to space it out, it would make a 580 page book, give or take. I may have done NaNoWriMo before. Anyway, the point is that’s why we invented chapters in the first place. I have a mental image of a guy on an old manual page press, being handed the 580 pages to typeset, and breaking down. He’s sitting in a corner, crying, rocking back and forth.

Today he’s your database. Your database is sitting in a corner with PHP, crying. “Why are you giving me so much to do at once, PHP?” And poor PHP is sobbing. “I don’t know, I can’t even handle it!”

Anyway. Smaller posts. People won’t read 200k in one go. Not even speed readers.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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