Today geekrant.org’s stylesheet was fading in and out of existance. Well, to be precise, the path to it got screwed up a bit, because somehow it thought it was in a directory called (deep breath):

http://www.geekrant.org/wp-login.php/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/wp-images/smilies/ wp-images/smilies/

rather than the much more succinct (and correct):

http://www.geekrant.org/

This appears to be caused by a bug in WordPress 1.21, where under some circumstances registered users go to login, and a particular browser/server configuration is present (looks like something to do with proxies) and it thinks the WordPress directory has moved, and tries to compensate. It’s detailed in the WordPress support forums, and if anybody’s having problems with it, the fix is to manually fix the siteurl setting in the wp_options table (it’s the first row) and to get into wp-login.php and comment out the two lines following

// If someone has moved WordPress let’s try to detect it

…because really, if someone’s moved it, they should have done it properly and updated the siteurl setting themselves.

See, not even WordPress is perfect. But it does have a strong user community, open source code that’s not too confusing to dabble in even for PHP-newbies like me, and a straightforward database structure holding all it’s stuff together. And that counts for a lot, I think.