I rescued my missing fishing blog together with my AI partner Kuro (Claude) and brought more than 1,000 posts back to life. I wrote about that in the previous two posts.
But getting the posts back did not mean everything was fine. The links on the front page, the doorway to the whole blog, did nothing when you pressed them.
This is the record of how Kuro and I tracked that down and fixed it.
The links had turned into plain black text
The top page of my blog has a row of guide links on it: “Search fishing spots here”, “Fishing trip reports here”, and so on. They are signposts, there so a reader can get to the page they actually want.
After the recovery, though, those links were not blue anymore. Clicking them did nothing at all. They were just black text sitting on the page. Signposts that had stopped working as signposts.
I had no idea which part of it was wrong. So I took a screenshot of the top page’s HTML, the blueprint of the page, and showed it to Kuro.
There were two causes, not one
Kuro read the screenshot and found two problems.
There are two issues. The first is that every link URL is written with http://. https:// is the standard now for security reasons, so leaving them as http:// causes problems. The second is that the links are buried inside heading tags, the decoration that makes text large. With that combination, Cocoon’s appearance settings cancel out the link colour and the response.
Cocoon is a free WordPress theme made in Japan and widely used by Japanese bloggers, including me. Honestly, even after the explanation I only understood about half of it. But I had been told clearly, “these are the two causes, and this is the fix,” so I decided to leave the rest to Kuro.
Kuro rebuilt the whole HTML of the top page from scratch. The links were moved out of the headings and into ordinary body text, and every URL was rewritten to https://.
I pasted that into WordPress, and on my laptop every link came back, properly styled and properly clickable. Cocoon even generated a clean table of contents on its own. The page looked like a different site.
Then my phone refused to cooperate
Fixed on the laptop. But when I opened my own blog on my iPhone, the links were black text again and tapping them did nothing.
“Wait, didn’t we just fix this?” I started to worry all over again.
When I asked Kuro, I got a procedure for narrowing it down instead of an answer.
Open private mode in Safari on your phone and look at the blog. In private mode you are viewing it while not logged in to WordPress, which is the same state an ordinary reader is in. Whether the links work there tells us which cause we are dealing with.
I did not even know how to open private mode, so Kuro walked me through that too. Open the tab list in Safari and choose “Private”. That is all.
I tried it. The links worked perfectly.
The culprit was a black bar only I could see
They worked in private mode, which meant the links themselves were fine. The cause was somewhere else. Kuro explained it like this.
The real problem is the admin bar that appears at the top of the screen while you are logged in to WordPress. Viewed from a phone in a logged-in state, that black bar sits over the links and gets in the way of your taps. In other words, it has no effect on ordinary readers at all. It only happens on your screen, while you are logged in.
It was almost an anticlimax. Readers had been seeing the page normally the whole time, and their taps had been working the whole time. The only screen where the links would not respond was mine, logged in as the administrator. The actual damage was zero.
Still, it is inconvenient not to be able to press my own links every time I check the site, so I dealt with it. In WordPress, go to Users, then Profile, and uncheck “Show Toolbar when viewing site”. That is the whole fix. With that off, the black bar disappears even while I am logged in, and the links are tappable on my phone like normal.
“Broken” and “looks broken” are not the same thing
The biggest thing I learned this time is that a problem that appears to be happening is not necessarily a thing that is actually broken.
When the links would not respond on my phone, I went pale and thought, “another failure, I have to redo all of it.” In reality it was reaching readers just fine, and it was a display issue on my admin screen alone. If Kuro had not been there, I might have convinced myself it was broken, started poking at something that did not need fixing, and genuinely broken it.
Being handed a procedure, “let’s isolate it first.” Being calmed down with, “this causes no real harm.” Just those two things save an enormous amount of pointless panic.
Even when almost everything is beyond me, if I check one thing at a time I do get to the finish line. I felt that again.
If you want the earlier chapters of this rescue, I wrote about bringing the abandoned blog back in how I restored a blog I had given up on, and about pulling the lost posts back out of the archive in recovering lost posts with the Wayback Machine.
