Weblogs at Harvard

Server migration and a few bugs with CSS

You may have noticed earlier this week that the blogs were unavailable for a portion of the day and that some blogs were displaying errors or were displaying incorrectly.  If you noticed this, you are one of the few blog owners or blog viewers who were adversely affected by our server migration early that morning.

We worked over the course of the day to fix the various issues that appeared, including rewriting some code in various plugins and themes. One of the issues that could not be fixed was an incompatibility between two plugins, Jetpack and WordPress Custom CSS (also known as Safe CSS). As a result of this conflict, the WordPress Custom CSS plugin had to be removed. There were approximately 50 blogs that were using the WordPress Custom CSS plugin which were affected by this incompatibility.

We’ve worked over the week to migrate all the custom CSS over, to work with the new custom CSS functionality within Jetpack. However, you as the blog owner who were using the previous plugin now need to enable the Jetpack functionality.

To do this you first need to perform the following steps:

1. Enable Jetpack
   1. Click on the Jetpack link in the administration section of your blog. The link should appear in your admin left navigation bar as well as on your administration dashboard.
   2. Connect to your WordPress.com account by clicking the connect button and logging in to WordPress.com or if you don’t have an account you can create one on the same page.
2. Once Jetpack is enabled, enable Custom CSS
   1. If you are not already on the Jetpack dashboard, click on the Jetpack link again.
   2. Click on the ‘See the other 27 Jetpack features’ on the bottom of that page
   3. Hover your mouse over the Custom CSS row – a link to activate that feature will appear.  Click on that link.
3. Once Custom CSS is enabled, activate your CSS customizations
   1. Hover your mouse over the Custom CSS row – a link to configure that feature will appear.  Click on that link.
   2. A CSS stylesheet editor will appear – your original custom CSS edits should appear in this window.
   3. Click Save Stylesheet to apply the Custom CSS
4. You should now see the custom CSS changes.

Thank you for your patience in the process of our migration – we apologize for the inconvenience this caused.