The little buttons in my post-editing toolbar in WordPress disappeared and no alt text showed up in its place. The images were all valid and viewable individually in their respective folders, so I couldn’t see a problem. I searched for references to the issue with respect to wordpress post editor tinyMCE. No luck. I even installed the tinyMCE Advanced plugn to see if that would solve the problem, but that just gave me the opportunity to stare at even more blank buttons.

Meanwhile, I’d noticed an issue with my web-hosting stats program. For some reason clicking a visited link that had no www. in front of the domain, in the logs, was redirecting to the root folder for the site and adding the www. This meant the links were wrong and it was spawning a 404 missing page error. Very frustrating.

The solution to both problems came when it occurred to me that it might be due to some faulty redirects in the Apache server .htaccess file. So, I checked that configuration file in the root…all seemed okay. I then took a look at the .htaccess file in the WordPress folder. Eureka! I’d found it. The WordPress version of .htaccess is meant to handle permalink rewrites and any mods required by plugins, but in addition to those it seemed to be a carbon copy of its namesake in my root folder.

As my root folder .htaccess had some rewrites for adding the www without duplicate content penalties that explained the 404s with the stats file. It also had some code to direct people reaching the site via an image search to an appropriate page. It seems that this was the underlying cause of the missing button. Having those rewrites in the WordPress version of .htaccess meant every time I opened the editor it was looking in the wrong place for the images to draw the buttons. Problem solved.