Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Wordpress
Cannot login to WordPress and password reset mail not working
Posted by on August 30, 2011
I have had a problem recently which has prevented me from accessing the admin pages on this blog, or indeed posting anything – which is a shame as it’s VMworld week and I’m “sure” you all want to know what I think 
.
This blog is hosted on wordpress.com – the free online service, it works for me as I generally don’t have time manage the WordPress patches etc. so it’s all handled “in the cloud” for me (see, that VMworld effect!)
I was recently asked to reset my WordPress password due to a possible security compromise (see this link) which I duly did, however I was then unable to login again, so I figured maybe I had fat-fingered the password – no problem I can just reset the password and click a link in an email in the usual manner.
Umm, nope.
No matter how many times I tried this wouldn’t work – I didn’t receive any email allowing me to change my password which meant I was locked out.
I spent ages messing with my mail account to see if it was a spam issue – it wasn’t ; I had another WordPress.com blog – I could reset the password on that perfectly which eventually ruled out a mail problem.
I logged a support ticket with WordPress, after a while they came back to me but couldn’t find the email address that should be associated with my blog.
The root cause? I had used an alias for my email account when I created my blog, rather than my normal e-mail account simon@mydomain.com rather than firstname.surname@mydomain.com which I normally use as my email address.
I recently moved mail service and it seems the simon@ alias was dropped in the process, thus the password reset emails were lost in the process – it was easy enough to re-add the mail aliases on my mail provider’s systems and I could then receive the password reset emails.
So, moral of the story – be consistent in the email address you use when setting up online services (or at least keep a record, and keep them working forever) – not entirely sure why I chose to use a non-standard alias, but I did.
Duh!
Normal service has now been resumed.
New Blog Furniture
Posted by on February 27, 2008
Have been playing with a few new widgets, and I figured out how to add HTML code into the pages that wordpress.com hosts.
If you need to do it – just add a “Text” widget and then you can put any HTML code you like in that and it gets processed as part of the page load.
So, for now I’ve added clustrmaps – only takes a couple of mins – instructions here
I’ve also added Feedburner for my RSS feeds, I’ve seen a big spike in traffic to my blog over the last week
I’m trying to figure out where it is coming from… the default wordpress.com stats (where this site is hosted) don’t really go into much more detail than number of hits; and it doesn’t seem to tally up with the search-engine results or click referrals – so maybe that will shed some light on it.
Otherwise pop a comment on this post and let me know what you find interesting and I’ll try to tailor some content around your needs, the How to deploy a virtual machine from a template seems to be the most popular post so far.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 