Hello, apologies I did not realize that this post actually made it through, and the kind staff at DigitalOcean has helped me immensely to get this set up.

In review, after I had made this posting here is a couple things I realized and followed:

-For each post not being accessible, i first adjusted the read/write permissions on the “.htmlaccess” file with this command in the terminal:

chown www-data: /usr/share/wordpress/.htaccess

and then i followed the step described in the page below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-wordpress-posts-returning-404-error/#:~:text=Go%20to%20Settings%20%C2%BB%20Permalinks%2C%20and,probably%20need%20to%20update%20your%20.

i think this just “refreshed” the wordpress settings and fixed up the post links

-Then i realized there was an issue of not being able to delete themes from my wordpress site (when posting and everything else seemed fine). for this a DO staff member had advised me to add this line in the file “/usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php” (at the very end of the file):

define('FS_METHOD','direct');

and this resolved that issue. I still seem to have issues with automated updates by Wordpress, but i am hoping some of the resources provided to me by the DO staff will aid me on this…