I mentioned about this in my previous blog post, but yes, again, I broke my site again!
Its the contact me form again. I had issues in the past with the site going off line randomly and I’ve been trying to sort that since June or July (yeah, none of that stuff please? You know, the month numbers?) 2025, I can’t remember which, but the site kept going off line, disabled multiple plugins and my site host started a new server, still kept going offline but a lot less than before, so I kept disabling more and more plug-ins. The previous contact form was driven by JetPack, which is a plug-in for WordPress which comes with a handy contact form builder and has other nice features like the ability to update via an app on a mobile device, which I used extensively on my blog when it was in a sub folder before I rebuilt everything and got to grips with how WordPress works (I actually was planning to go back to Joomla as I previously have done, WordPress just has a load of plug-ins).
So disabling JetPack = no contact. Luckily I had another way to build contact forms, which came from PageLayer. If I thought about it, I could of built it from scratch for 4 times the time it would of taken and that’s an estimate as it would require some PHP coding. (I don’t fancy that!)
So imagine my surprise and excitement when I got an email on the 23/12/2025 from a user, read it and great! I can’t respond, because I would be responding to myself.. how the hell? Did some investigation, tests, runs and found a setting I had enabled. “Ooops”. This is in a plug-in called “GoSMTP”, great. So I tried again, it worked but some clients weren’t sending emails. Great.
So with all the plug-in problems I’ve had from the same provider, I thought “Ok, lets fix this”, I did, tried every way possible, removed GoSMTP, it worked – this is the classic developer thing of “it worked on my comptuer.” WRONG!
So tried it on my work computer and guess what? The email bounced! Great, more figuring and testing. It looks like PageLayer uses the existing email client to send a computer which will work if you don’t have an exotic OS. I use a mix of Linux, Windows, Android, iOS and occasionally, MacOS.
Then discovered that GoSMTP doesn’t do what I want it to do as it is for sending emails from the site, not for receiving email (it seem to work that way), so tried pagelayer and that then stopped sending emails via the submit button, so tried the WP form which is driven by… Jetpack.
But it also doesn’t work the same way, it sends an email, my wessexelectricnut address never gets it, so goes via my home address. All fun and games.
So if you have tried to send me an email and didn’t get a response, I do apologise, try now.
(and I got a lot more bugs to fix! Like the blog pages, I’ll find a way – its to do with the templates).