I love the fact that the best source of answers to internet-related problems is the internet itself. If that seems like an obvious statement, just think about it a bit longer…can other things tell you how to fix themselves? Does you car or your microwave or your lawnmower or your dog allow you to find a solution internally and then apply that solution to effect a repair?

After setting up my new MacBook I was having a small problem with the blogging bundle for TextMate – for some reason I couldn’t fetch posts from or add new posts to this blog, which uses WordPress. I was getting this error: “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only”. I couldn’t find the answer on the TextMate blogging bundle page, but there were a few comments there from others with the same problem.

Next stop, Google. Put in “wordpress XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only” and I’m led (no surprises here) to this page: Wordpress “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only”. Someone else with the same problem and the same webhost – and a solution: add the following line to the top of the xmlrpc.php file (in the wordpress directory):

$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents('php://input');

(Turns out, the problem is related to the version of PHP used on the webserver.)

So, that’s done now.

What makes all this work is that people keep a record on the internet about what they do with the internet. Search the internet and I have a solution to my problem, which was about getting my stuff onto the internet.

Using the internet has fixed my problem and allowed me to use the internet. It’s self-healing.