First a little definitions and then I’ll explain what and how to fix a problem I had recently with a Firefox extension I use.
Firefox: Hopefully everyone knows about this already so a link is all it gets.
WordPress: A CMS/blog system that I use for this site.
Deepest Sender: This is a cool little extension for FireFox that I use to post on my blog. It is a ‘blog this page’ type of an extension. It allows you to right click on any page and type up a post about that page and/or keep going and do a whole bunch. Then it allows you to click post/publish and it will write it to your weblog without you having to go to your actual WordPress install and post/publish what you need.
Ok with those out of the way time for the Problem & Fix.
The Problem:
Seemingly out of nowhere I went to blog about a page I was visiting and when I hit the login button on the main page for Deepest Sender I got an error. The error read:
type error: node has no properties
I could work offline and even save it, but for the life of me I couldn’t login to actually post it.
The Fix:
As with any problem I decide to fix it myself. I thought it must be my settings, so I uninstalled that extension and then re-installed it. No Luck
Then I made sure I had the most recent install of Firefox. Yes I did
As with any problem my next step is to do a search (or two). After doing a search for fixes on Google and Yahoo and coming up with only one promising link. I decided to go to it and solve my problem. No luck - the so-called fix wasn’t anything that really applied to my situation.
Then I remembered that the web host my site was hosted on was doing some security updates and decided to check with them. BINGO
What happened was that a file on the host server (mod_security) was updated and was blocking access to my xmlrpc.php file which is what Deepest Sender or (performancing - another ‘blog-this-page’ type extension) was trying to access. So to solve the problem the host must go in that file and allow access to this file (if you contact your host they should know how to do this, if not contact me and I’ll help them). Believe it or not thats all it takes. Once access was restored I was able to login and it has been business as usual since then.
Hopefully this helps someone else with the same problem. Till then… Stay Focused!
August 26th, 2006 at 9:53 am
[…] focusminded.com describes a security setting which could indeed be the issue, but before contacting your hosting provider to check security problems, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have deepest sender looking for the right “xmlrpc.php” page set to your posting page. If you copied the URL directly from wordpress for posting, you’ll probably have something like http://domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php. You really want http://domain.com/wordpress/xmlrpc.php. Try that URL out, if it exists, it’s the correct one (by exists, I mean you’ll get something other than a 404 error). If you’ve already got the correct xmlrpc.php page, you might have the security issue that is described by the focusminded site and you may need to contact your hosting provider. […]
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Excellent, thanks guys! I had this exact problem and in fact I had pointed DS to /wp-admin/post.php instead of xmlrpc.php. Once I changed the URL it started working fine.
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:58 pm
[…] Thanks go to James who posted this story on his blog and to zilch_space who provided the fix that I was pointed to the wrong URL for the extension. […]
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Ah, the extension is much nicer than using the URL link from WP, now I can type in the sidebar while reading the source page in the main pane. Thanks again for the help.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Hi,
A year later I had the same problem when my server updated their modsecurity.conf files. if you have shell access to your account, all you need to do is follow the instructions at:
http://timrohrer.com/blog/?p=96
Thanks for pointing me along the way when this happened to me!