Rebooting

I realized this week that I was having some trouble getting pingbacks to work on the site. I spent far too much time scouring the internet looking for solutions to the problem with little luck. Ultimately, it appears that the issue was more specifically related to my conditions than I initially expected, but in the event that somebody else comes along with a similar malfunction, here’s how I’ve managed to solve it.

After performing a completely fresh installation of WordPress, I figured out that the problem was maddeningly simple. It turns out that I had a bit of commented code in my header.php file that was pasted in from Word. I retyped that comment without any capitalization, entering my own line breaks, and now pingbacks are magically working again. So, if you find that WordPress is mysteriously not sending pingbacks, this is one more thing to try. Hopefully this will save somebody else a bit of the headache I went through this week.

Also, my apologies for all of the random posts, a few of which were mistakenly linked from my Twitter status and appeared in my RSS feed. While this ended up being a quick fix, it took far too much experimentation to diagnose. Things should be back to normal now, and in the future I should be doing these kinds of tests in my new development area where they won’t bother anyone.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote for me!