Ask Questions to Solve Technical Problems
A few weeks ago a client had a problem editing a page on her website. The site was a Drupal site (Drupal is a type of content management system, a very sophisticated one), and it turned out the editor was not working properly in Internet Explorer. When she switched to Firefox, she had no problem editing the page. (Why it didn’t work in IE may have been due to IE not interpreting some stray code properly, but we were satisfied with switching to Firefox).
I decided to make a list of questions to ask when a computer problem related to a content management system arises. I’ve worked with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, and the questions one would ask a client or oneself are similar across platforms.
Here are a few:
- What operating system do you use? (ex. Mac, Windows, UNIX)
- Which browser are you using?
- Have you re-booted your computer?
- Did you paste in code from Microsoft Word? (Microsoft Word code can mess up a site – learn to use a code editor instead. Even little old Notepad in Windows would be an improvement).
- Some sites have test sites that look a lot like the live site. So you can ask: are you editing the test site and looking for the changes on the real/live site?
A quickie solution:
Here’s one just for WordPress: if you get a white screen of death, find your wp-config.php file and allow errors to appear (you will need to know how to use FTP to edit and replace the wp-config file – see the Codex on editing wp-config.php – look for DEBUG). Assuming it is allowed by your webhost, voila, you may find an error message instead of the white screen of death. Use the error message to solve the problem (it will tell you if the problem is a specific plugin, for example, or an error in your theme code).
Your Turn, Please
What questions would you ask? Have you ever had a computer problem that you couldn’t solve, but someone else figured out the “missing link”? Do you have any clever quickie solutions to offer? How do you solve technical problems?
I had to laugh when I read this becuase whenever I am working out a problem online my web guy always askes these questions. I guess I need reminding more then I think… LOL.
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Hi, Susan! And maybe your web guy has a few more that we can add to the list…
You really understand the world of technology Leora which is far beyond my comprehension. Fortunately for me I have great friends who help me out when something goes wrong.
Microsoft and anything associated with them seems to be causing an abundance of problems, at least for me. My computer has crashed a few times due to them blocking people from using Chrome instead of Internet Explorer. So you need to leave IE as the main one and use Chrome anyway. Microsoft has been fined several times by the European Commission for preventing individuals from using their competitors products.
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And Catarina, I learn from you about European economics! I’ve been spending many years learning the web and its technical details.
No defense of IE here, but Microsoft did produce Excel and Word, two products I use a lot (although perhaps Excel was originally just a copy of Lotus 123).
Firefox has many add-ons useful to developers; my children are big fans of Chrome, with its speed.
My first question is: Why am I spending my time doing stuff that I’m not great at doing?
Then I remember to ask my webmaster to do the stuff that’s out of my scope of expertise.
Great post!
Good response, Wendy! We all have our strengths.
Luckily i haven’t had this problem but in case I do i have bookmarked this page Leora. I often wonder why someone (or at least I haven’t found one) that has a product to sell to help people with the common problems. It would certainly save many of us time. Thanks for the information.
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Leora — I second your comment about Word documents. I used to copy and paste them into my dashboard but learned my lesson when the headlines came out screwy. Now I insert my posts into the Word template (it’s in the kitchen sink, don’t know the exact term for it) which eliminates the coding problem and type in the headlines.
First solution when something goes wrong — turn off the computer and restart. This morning for some reason I couldn’t log into my computer so I turned it off, pulled out the plug, waited a few seconds and put the plug back in. That’s a little secret I learned from iMac tech support.
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Jeannette, yes, turning the computer off, waiting and then turning it on again works a lot! Sometimes just turning one thing off (I turn off the wireless adapters and back on again on one computer) solves a problem.
Good one Leora….sometimes it is always better to ask these trivial questions before thinking of a bigger problem. You never know, it maybe one of these and you may be done with it in a matter of few minutes.
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Glad you like this approach, Praveen. It goes together with the basic philosophy of many problems in life get repeated – if we work together to figure out possible solutions, someone has the question that will lead to the solution for each problem.
Hello Leora great post my friend, I don’t normally have many problems but if I do we all have the best tools available Google search, You can fine any answer your looking for using Google.
This method has help me in more ways then one.
Thanks so much for a great read Leora
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Yes, that’s certainly true, that one can often Google for an answer. The experts are happy to post their ideas online.