In my WordPress theme, there is a Widget that allows me to put posts from certain categories into the sidebar. I decided I had a use for this widget, and I installed it. The result? The darn thing doesn’t work properly. Of course it doesn’t. Nothing I do ever seems to work when it comes to WordPress.

The intriguing and maddening aspect to this trend is that WordPress (and computers in general) always misbehaves in a precise and exact way. It’s like it can read my mind and will refuse to do the one thing I want it to do. It will do everything else no problem. But it won’t do the one thing I need it to do. And there never seems to be a reason for this.

In this case, I have only one category that I want to appear in the sidebar. Just one. I called it “Random Thoughts”. I was going to use it for posts that don’t fit anywhere else – just random thoughts that pop into my head. Sort of like a Facebook Status Update or a Twitter feed. Instead of dumping my random thoughts onto Facebook, I was going to dump them into my blog. So I created this Category called Random Thoughts and used that widget to put it in the sidebar.

Typically, it didn’t work. The completely crazy thing is that this widget WILL insert every other category. I have dozens and dozens of categories in my blog. And they all work with this widget. Every single solitary one EXCEPT for the one category that I WANT to put in this widget. Even more crazy, the widget WILL insert this category on individual post pages. But I don’t want it there. I want it on the front page of my blog. And that is the ONE place it WON’T appear.

I’ve done all the troubleshooting I can think of. I’ve tested this widget with many different categories, and it works just fine with all of them. Then I try it with the “Random Thoughts” category, and it won’t work. I deleted the category and created a brand new one. It still wouldn’t work. I took an old category that worked with this widget and renamed it “Random Thoughts”. With this new name, it wouldn’t work. With the old name, it worked. With the name I wanted, it wouldn’t work.

I created new test posts and put them into this category. Nothing showed up. I did everything I could think of. I followed every logical path, and I reached the usual dead ends. All that is left is the supernatural. Perhaps I should conduct a seance, sprinkle some herbs, chant, or cast a spell.

I put this post into the “Random Thoughts” category. Theoretically, the post should appear in the sidebar. If you don’t see it there, then you know I am still out there, somewhere in the world, smashing my fist through a computer monitor in frustration.

Update: I tried a few new things, and it still won’t work. I created brand new categories with new names, and they wouldn’t show up. Again, every other category will show up. The only one that won’t is the single category that I want to show up. WordPress can read minds?

Final Update: I am chagrined. It turns out that there was nothing wrong with WordPress and it was not reading my mind and torturing me deliberately. It’s too complicated to explain, but there was a setting buried deep in my theme’s dashboard that, in unexpected ways, was producing this problem. I unselected a certain option, and the category appeared on my front page in the widget. Of course, this now created a further problem. I’m working on that new problem now…

 

Tags: EXCEPT, Facebook, ONE, Random Thoughts