NVM — was able to successfully activate the theme by opening an instance of Chromium w/ web security disabled just to activate the theme.

For anyone finding this later I simply used the following code to open Chromium and activate the theme. Remember to exit out of Chromium/Chrome and open back up w/ web security enabled before doing any additional web browsing!

open -a Chromium --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=""

OR

open -a Google\ Chrome --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=""

I am getting the following error in both cases (manual or normally):

“XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://216.172.184.61/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?td_theme_name=Newspaper&v=8.0. No ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ header is present on the requested resource. Origin ‘null’ is therefore not allowed access.”

From my rudimentary googling it looks like this is indeed because I am trying to update this website w/ localhost before moving the new URL … it looks like I can use CORS to fix this but also looks like it is beyond my capabilities to implement (and may not be possible since I’m using shared hosting).

I don’t suppose there is an easy fix?