It always seems like the closer you get to finishing a big project, the whackier the obstacles in your way become.

When that time comes, I always find it helpful to clearly define my priorities—what needs to happen, what’s do-able, and what’s nice to have. This week, priority one was getting my live site up and running. Surprised? So was I.

I hadn’t looked at my project for a few days. I thought a full step away from the project would give me the energy I needed to finish the final push. But when I logged on to take a look at my site, I saw nothing but the WordPress White Screen of Death. Nothing on the front-end, nothing in the admin.

And that’s how I learned to pull out error messages from the apache_error.log file. After a quick google search, I learned that that was one of the best places to look. I also restarted my server, and realized I couldn’t connect. Queue the next half hour with the EasyWP support team.

Long story short: my site is back up and running, and I only lost a few hours of working time.

But I realized something heartening. If this had occurred a few weeks ago, a month ago, a semester ago, I don’t know how comfortable I would have been conversing with the support team. But I did it! I had done my research, I had concerns that I could articulate and I could answer the questions they asked me. That’s a skill I know I can carry forward in my life and career.

As far as progress on my site is concerned, I’m trying my best not to break things in the process of fixing something else. I’ve fixed a minor menu issue and have a fully-functional Jobs plug-in. Work remains on my Events plug-in, and I’ll need to decide whether to prioritize a bug-free plug-in over one with all of the bells and whistles, but that might not work.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my site. I really appreciate everyone who took the time to give it a look, and have added a lot of those suggestions to my list.