Category: Crankypantsing

I was able to get replacement code for the Linkpendium via the Wayback Machine. Yay! They archived it in March 2007, so it’s not the most current version, but who cares? Besides, it needed some serious weeding, anyway.

I’ve also pretty much finished re-loading all of my images into Coppermine[1]. There are about 600 (out of 2000+) that are still unsorted and unidentified, but I should have that finished in the next couple of days. If I don’t go cross-eyed, first. And if my hands don’t fall off.

Today I did all the digital photographs, and boy, was that ever a surreal experience. They spanned the last 4-5 years, and because they were sorted in file name order, they were chronological. Do you remember those filmstrips from grade school–the ones with the accompanying tape that beeped when you were supposed to forward to the next frame? It was kind of like watching a filmstrip of my life, only without the cheesy narration.

In other news, I had hoped to have a drawing for today, and I did start one, but it got kind of complicated, and there’s no way I’m going to get it finished before bedtime.

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1. Speaking of which, there will be much bozocity relating to the clicking of images in order to biggify them. Instead of the links being broken, they will now take you to pages with completely unrelated images and metadata. For example, if there is a photo of Harriet, and you click on it to view the large version, it may take you to a lovely sunset, or a mangled Barbie doll, or a pile of old tires. How fun!

This, um, “feature” will persist until I manually update the code in each and every blessed blog post that has an image that points to my Coppermine gallery. If I emerge from this process with my sanity intact, it will be a miracle.

This only is a problem with older images. Any images I post from here on out will–God willing–be fine.

I somehow managed to upgrade Coppermine, but it still didn’t work. After some blind tinkering (and I mean, really blind, as I haven’t the first clue what the hell I’m doing), I got it working. Of course, all the database tables are mangled, so now I have to decide if it’s worth messing with trying to re-upload all 2000+ files. It means more work for me, but the benefit is that the image files I display here will be about 1/10 to 1/20 of the size of the ones from Flickr. If you aren’t on broadband, this is a big, big deal. Even with broadband, it means slow loading times and being at the mercy of the whims of Flickr.

Of course, I could also get everything re-loaded only to have it crash on me again.

I got an e-mail from my web hosts, asking me to complete a survey on my experience with their tech support. What tech support?!

A few words of advice:

If you’ve only gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and it’s creeping up on 1am, you probably shouldn’t try fixing a couple of broken links on your website. Because, if you do, you may find that you’ve accidentally saved one file on top of another, obliterating it completely. No biggie, you can just grab a fresh copy of the code from your website, right? Well, no, not if you didn’t notice until after you’d uploaded the file and overwritten the good copy.

Thankfully, it was only my links page, which I don’t care (too much) about. The bare bones of it exist in a text file somewhere, if I ever feel like reconstructing it. It’s not a priority, though. If it had been anything else, I’ve got back-ups, but they aren’t properly coded, so losing the current copies might have made me weepy.

As suspected, my web host says that the problem is with my gallery software, and that I will have to take it up with the Coppermine folks. IDTS. The problem is a database corruption issue, which the Coppermine folks can do fuck all about. So my brain nearly implodiated, and then I cried. I don’t know why I was surprised, because I was expecting my web host to give me the brush off. I should have been prepared for it.

Anyway, there is no way in hell that I’m going to be able to unsnarl the mess, so I think what I’m going to do is try to point everything at Flickr. Of course, that makes me want to cry, too. I got a hundred posts done, which leaves 1062 to go. I think it may take me awhile!

On the bright–but no less frustrating–side, this means that I don’t have to try to keep any sort of unified theme going between Coppermine and WordPress. I spent some time weeding out my existing theme templates, and I uploaded a few new ones that look promising. The one I settled on seems to be pretty stable, though, of course, it doesn’t behave properly in IE. Instead of two sidebars, y’all will see just one. Be thankful that it’s not in the middle of the page, because at this point, I’m so fed up that I just don’t care.

I like the basic look of this template, but I can’t stand the weird line spacing after image files, so I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it.