I just tried posting a blog for the longest time but I would get back “error 500: internal server error”. Googling for this error isn’t helpful since it can be a plethora of things that is causing this error. I tried them all and nothing was working.

I then tried posting a test blog and it worked, so I figured it was something in the actual blog that I wrote that was causing the hiccup. I tried isolating all the weird characters, including the quotes in the text but still nothing. I tried copy and paste to notepad and back and that didn’t help. I tried typing over the text and it still gave me errors.

I finally located it was one particular paragraph that was causing WordPress pain. I continued by removing different sentences to see which sentence was problematic. I finally found the one (ONE!) word that caused the error. Obviously I cannot type the word, but it’s the second word in the name of the country that is now Russia, e.g. Soviet xxxxx. I even tried posting a blog with just that word and it won’t go through. And it’s just with this blog, I tried writing a post with this word on my other blogs and it’s ok. I suspect it’s a MYSQL error since the word is used to merge cells in a database, but still. What the hell.

Update: found the bug documented in the WordPress forums