In which the title of this very blog’s index page disappeared sometime back mysteriously.
Now, I don’t know much about Wordpress, but i experimented a bit with the theme’s header.php to no effect. It led me towards having a look at my plugins next. All-In-One-SEO pack seemed like a likely culprit and deactivating it fixed the title issue.
I then reactivated the plugin and tinkered with the settings. The Home Title setting was not set, and I had a brief Eureka moment that, that might be the issue. I put “%blog_title% in it and refreshed. Nope, no change. I then did, what every sane developer does at first symptom of wit’s end, google search. It seems a few other people were having the same problem (thankfully!).
To cut a long story short, i deleted the plugin (like literally deleted it) and reinstalled it. This kinda fixed the problem but this time the title was an explicit “%blog%”. Removing the newly updated value back to blank fixed the issue once and for all along with a working All-In-One-SEO pack plugin.
The root cause of the problem it seems was an automatic upgrade of the plugin which was incompatible with the version of Wordpress that i’m using (2.6.3). It could also be that i have to do a manual install of the latest version of the plugin with my current version of Wordpress, but for now i’m not terribly bothered.