A few days ago my authentication token that allowed Social Networks Auto-Poster to post my blog entries automatically expired (I can only authorize for a max of 2 months at a time). Usually the fix is quite simple, I just go to the account settings in the Plugin and then click on ‘Authorize Your LinkedIn Account (without Marketing API)’, after which I just have to authenticate using my LinkedIn password select Yes and then I am done. This time however, when I clicked on the Authorize connection button the system would redirect me to www.suramya.com/blog instead of the Plugin page which meant that the authentication process couldn’t complete. I spent a few hours trying to troubleshoot and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out the problem. I even tried installing another plugin but faced the same issue over there as well. In the end I decided to take a break and crash for the night as I was going nowhere.
Today I started looking at the problem again and was going to raise a support ticket with the plugin author to have them take a look at the issue and decided to check the FAQs just to ensure I didn’t miss anything obvious. The first entry in the FAQ talked about what to do if the plugin was redirecting to a “Blank Page” or an error page, according to the FAQ this could be caused by certain plugins and the fix was to disable the plugin, authorize and then re-enable them.
The last plugin I had installed was to Autopost my blog posts to Mastodon so I disabled the plugin and then tried authorizing the app again. To my utter delight the system immediately authorized the connection and I was able to make a test post successfully.
The moral of the story is that you should always check the documentation when something is not working rather than trying various things randomly.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya