Someone in number 11 is tap-tap-tapping on the wall. They’ve done this periodically over the past few days. I am tempted to randomly return fire. Or maybe offer them my stud finder.
And a random factoid: According to my WordPress dashboard, I’m at 1,953 posts. Though, for some reason, this post has a permalink number of 2037. I wonder why there’s a discrepancy between the two numbers? Anyway, 2000 should be coming up soon!
Andalso a random Lensbaby macro photo:
Raindrop on Sedum Leaf
I’ve only had the new version of WordPress up and running for about 24 hours, but I really like it. The dashboard is nice and clean. It runs faster. Things like the category checklist are much handier than in the last version I had installed. Before, the it was toward the bottom of the page, which meant I’d forget to add categories, so I’d frequently have to go back and edit posts after publishing.
This is my first experience with using widgets in WordPress, since they weren’t supported in my previous version. Being able to drag and drop modules into the sidebar, instead of having to copy and paste and tweak code, is pretty awesome.
Another thing included in this version was built-in gravitars. I have unleashed the cute monsters (!), so if you comment and don’t have your own gravitar, you’ll be assigned a little monster.
Assuming things stay nice and stable, the improvements were well worth the pain in my ass of upgrading.
I got up this morning, checked my email, and there sat a spam message for an old post. (You have to turn off all your plug-ins before upgrading WordPress, including your spam-catchers.) Surely this meant that the blog was back up and running?! Yes, indeed! My web host’s little elves seem to have fixerated everything overnight.
Praise be!
And now, I’m off to look for a new template. I’m tired of the old one, especially the lack of white space, but I haven’t been motivated to change it, since I knew I needed to upgrade WordPress. I didn’t see any sense in doing cosmetic surgery when there were some serious underlying health issues.
So, now I’m off to do the fun stuff! This means that things might temporarily look funny or there might be short periods of inaccessibility.
(Yes, I was happy to get blogspam!)
And by better, I of course mean worse. Much, much worse.
The Esther blog, which I upgraded successfully last weekend, is now broken. It’s apparently something to do with the database, which totally does not surprise me, but if that’s what it is I don’t understand why it worked for a couple of days. Very weird!
Looking at the database, and assuming I’m interpreting it correctly, there seems to be the same problem with the comments table that I had when trying to upgrade the main blog. And, of course, I can’t restore from a backup on the server, because the oldest available backup is Monday’s, and that was already corrupted. WTF?! Whatever happened happened between Saturday and Monday.
That isn’t a huge deal, I guess, since that blog just functions to let interested people know when there are new letters. I figured folks could subscribe to the RSS feed and it would make it easy for anyone interested in following along to know when there was new content. Which is a long way of saying, I can start over from scratch there without any problem. Assuming I can get WordPress to work out of the box. I didn’t have much luck with that the last time I tried it.
The crap with the main blog is even more annoying. I’m back where I started from, with what seems to be a more or less functional install of WPv2.6. I need to upgrade to WPv2.8.1. If I try to do it all over again, I’ll just recreate the mess I made on Monday morning. I have no idea how to proceed. I asked tech support if I could just upload the v2.8.1 files to my directory, then have them do the database upgrade. I’m betting they tell me “Hell, no!” Really, though, it would save them (and me, obviously) a bunch of time, trouble, and confusion.
All that said, since the upgrade of the Esther blog has now gone kerplooie, I’m at a total loss as to what to do. Even if we get the new version of WordPress up and running, will the database become corrupted after the fact?
We’re back where we started from, which is way better than losing the whole shebang, but kind of annoying nonetheless.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do, because WordPress really does need to be upgraded. This version is horribly insecure. But if I try to upgrade again, I’ll be back in the same mess I was in yesterday. Grrrr. At this point, if tech support can’t help me figure it out, I’m half tempted to install a fresh copy of WordPress on another subdomain, import everything into it, then wipe this one out completely and start over from scratch. Then, import everything back into this installation. What a pain in the ass! There has to be a better way to do this, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.
Three new letters. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any new letters, but I had to wait until I got a new scanner. Which I have. And which is zippy and super neato-nifty! It may, in fact, be too much scanner for me.
September 22, 1921 from Bertha
September 22, 1921 from Luella Glendening
September 24, 1921 from Mrs. Craig to Miss Hiatt
The letter from Luella is long, but there is an interesting (to me, anyway) bit toward the end about evangelical preachers and how they seem to always target women. A nice little bit of patriarchy blaming.
Also! And this is way more exciting to me than new scanners. I had to upgrade the Esther blog, onna counta some of the files were corrupted (or it was hacked?). So, I took a deep breath, bit the bullet, and upgraded. It did not take the five minutes promised by the good, delusional folks at WordPress, but at about 20 minutes, the ordeal was not so much of an ordeal. In fact, it was downright easy, with no broken databases! This means that I may (may!) soon feel up to the challenge of upgrading this blog. Not today, though. I have a headache and that might actually cause my brain to implodiate.
ETA 13 Jul 2009:
Well scratch that! It seems like the Esther blog has mysteriously gone dead (“Error establishing a database connection”). I looked at the database, and it has the same error that this one did (duplicate key in the comments_approved table). I don’t know enough about MySQL databases or about interpreting error logs to know whether or not that’s the problem, and right now, it’s not a priority, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time messing with it. But, what I am is worried about that the fact that it was working fine after upgrading, and then it became corrupted. Does this mean that, if I do succeed in upgrading the main blog, that it will then become corrupted, too? What a pain in the ass!
ETA 18 Jul 2009:
I went ahead and ditched the Esther blog, and just pointed all the “What’s New” links to the Esther category here. I don’t know why on earth I didn’t think of that in the first place!
I had to work this morning, but left just before the roads got bad. There wasn’t a whole lot of snow, but there was icy-sleety horribleness underneath it, and I didn’t want to be out in it. Which is just as well, because things were not okay in blogland, and if I’d been working all day, I wouldn’t have had time to fix the problem. I really need to upgrade WordPress, but not today, thankyewverymuch!
If you leave comments like this, I am not likely to approve them. Especially if you don’t even have the testicular fortitude to leave a real email address.
the earth, the moon, the stars, liberism, abortion, gay marriage, free sex, killed unborn children, 50 million dead, no problems.
That was left on the Bill O’Reilly-Christian Bale mashup video post. Funny thing is, I had almost made a comment about how much I fucking loathe Billy-O, but decided against it. So whatever this anonymous troll was responding to, it wasn’t anything I actually said. Maybe she and/or he is psychic, in addition to addle-brained?
Seriously, liberism? I am not, nor have I ever been, an ancient Roman. And to wingnuts, isn’t “killing unborn children” the same thing as abortion? So he is not only illiterate, but repetitious. I don’t know what the 50 million dead refers to, but I’m pretty sure it’s not my fault. Gay marriage? Why should straight people have all the misery? The best part, though, is that Trolly McTrollersons seems to be advocating sex with prostitutes. Again, WTF?
There is all kinds of talk about Lj going bye-bye, apparently based on this article. My journal isn’t very large, and if it were lost, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But, I know some of you out there who use Lj have large journals going back many years. There are various back-up tools. I tried LjArchive, and it worked really well. You can choose to download the uncompressed exe file or a zip file, and it’s apparently platform independent.
And that’s all I know.
Once again, something I did inadvertently changed the setting for whether or not commenters must log in. I don’t want people to have to log in, so it was unintentional! It should be fixed now, though an unfortunate side-effect is that comments are now closed on old posts. I have no idea how to fix that, but in terms of cutting down on spam, it’s just as well.
ETA: And more on those creepy purity balls, courtesy of Jackie. I’m all for fathers being active parents (um, that’s their job), but I think this stuff crosses the line into fetish.
red paper boat 