Damn that took a long time! I have finally managed to clear the warning messages that appeared on my blog, which looked like the following:

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1 in /htdocs/wp-includes/classes.php on line 95

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1 in /htdocs/wp-includes/classes.php on line 96

It didn't only show one though, it showed up to 15 of them and appeared randomly one time while I was editing some of my installed WordPress plugins. I submitted a support ticket to my host asking them whether they had made any changes to my server recently and their senior engineers took the trouble and effort to try and sort out something that was not even caused by them, which was very helpful. I do not think they were familiar enough with WordPress to be able to tell me that it was something to do with permalinks though.

I knew that I was registered to the WP-Testers mailing list so decided to put it to good use and ask whether anyone had any information about this error message. Within about 10 minutes I got a reply from someone named DD32 who had very kindly read my message and written this reply:

Thats something to do with the Pretty Permalinks, (URL Rewriting).
Purely a suggestion would be to either disable permalinks, and then re-enable them, or to change the permalink structure to something else, and then back again, Just to flush the rules and get it to re-generate the rules.

Also, any plugins you have recently installed might be causing an issue, the general stuff.

This fixed the problem, yet I am still not sure why it occurred in the first place because I was not making any adjustments to my permalinks.

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed that my blog has been constantly changing over the past month, this is because I am in the process of testing plugins that I can install. The error messages that were shown to me for no apparent reason (see above) were the final straw though, and I have now taken the trouble to transfer all of my K2 modifications from version 0.9.5 to 0.9.6 and I have also created myself a separate WordPress installation to test improvements on. At the moment, this blog powered by 52 plugins and counting. For instance, I have recently installed and customised these plugins:

  • Dashboard Editor: Enabling me to remove the unwanted crap (such as Developer News) from my WordPress dashboard and add anything I wish.
  • Dean's Code Highlighter: Highlights code that I post on my blog – this has been hugely edited to suit my needs, it now accomodates a plain text link feature (for ease of copying) and a nicer styling.
  • Enforce www. Preference: To remove the www. prefix from my blog's URL when a visitor navigates to my blog.
  • WP-Untexturize: Runs through all of my posts and pages, removing the 'curly-quotes' and other pointless text modifiers that don't seem to display properly anyway.
  • WP-Cache: This is used so that my blog loads faster by way of reading cached files so that it does not have to parse all of the PHP code everytime a visitor browses my blog.
  • Firestats: An amazing statistics plugin, showing visitor detail including country, web browser and operating system – very helpful for web developers who like to see their website statistics.

I will be installing more at a later date, but I think that 52 is a good number, maybe that explains why my blog is responding so slowly.