Interesting times…
Okay, here’s how I fixed the blog, with a lot of help from my robot friends. Someone I know who manages a lot of web sites says he switched from ChatGPT to Codex and hasn’t written a line of his own code in a year. So I downloaded Codex (it’s a separate program) and asked ChatGPT how to drive it.
It had me zip together the whole blog and feed it to Codex in one big gulp. It absorbed the whole thing and wrote a detailed report and then told me I’d used up my credits FOR THE WHOLE MONTH.
I suppose I should drop back and describe what the problem was. The blog wouldn’t load the latest version of PHP, which is the programming language used by things like WordPress (this is a WordPress blog, if you didn’t know). If I loaded anything newer than 7.4, it returned a terrifying blank white screen. And that was a problem because the latest Akismet (the module that runs our antispam) wouldn’t run on anything but 8+. Hence all the manual approving of posts.
When I built this place nearly twenty years ago, I tinkered with the code a lot. You probably don’t remember, there used to be little sidebar animations and all kinds of weird stuff. I was sure it was some dumbass thing I did that was holding it back.
Fortunately, I had the report and I had plenty of credit with ChatGPT. It showed me how to turn error reporting on, so when it crapped out on me with 8.0 we’d know exactly why. And it wasn’t anything in my code after all – Codex said nothing I did was a problem. It was the plugin that let you edit your own comments. It had some line of code that wasn’t compatible with PHP8.0.
So! While I had the robot’s attention, we tweaked a few things and everything is now running great. The automatic thingummy that audits your blog health is rated Good for the first time in years. I’ve come to the conclusion that plugins are evil – every technical issue I’ve ever had here was due to a badly constructed plugin.
The man who turned me on to Codex? The one who’s a bigger booster of AI than even I am? He told me AI is starting to frighten him.
June 29, 2026 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 3