So I told you that things got all fudged up on Tuesday, but gave nary a detail. Now I’ll try to recount my stupidity.
For starters, I absolutely LOVE the way WordPress has been progressing. And due to my impatience, I became a fairly early adopter of using the more “cutting edge” builds. I just couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into static pages (see the “About” page), themes (ok, I’m still using Kubrick, but at least it’s handled as a bundled theme), and the various admin improvements. Now that the Dashboard is a truly functional page (it displays the 5 latest posts and comments, as well as drafts, stats, and the latest from the Dev Blog)… well I’m just giddy. The point of all this is that I’m running the beta version here and often lose my head in the “excitement” of upgrades.
On Tuesday, I saw a response on the forums that cleared up how I could start to reorganize the site the way I truly want it to be done. Basically, I want each section to be divided into subdirectories (/blog for the blog, /gallery for the photo gallery, etc.), but I also want to control some of the non-blog writing with the new static pages in WP 1.5 (once again, see the About page). Once I tested out the method Dougal suggested (yes, I actually tested it out on another site) I decided to modify this one to start planning for the future. And that’s where the smooth sailing stopped.
Yes, I did do thorough backups, and that’s why everything is still up. But once I uploaded the latest nightly, the site refused to display. I could get to the admin section, but the blog would not appear. I couldn’t figure out if the problem was with .htaccess, php, permissions, or what. To make matters even worse, I was doing this work on my laptop and had forgotten the power cord at work so I had a bit of a deadline!
My frustration grew with each failed attempt to locate the error. Finally, after doublechecking the backups, I just wiped out the site completely. I removed the database and the entire WP directory and started from scratch. I did a fresh install of the latest nightly and, much to my chagrin, everything looked fine. That meant I would have to import my old site. Unfortunately, I don’t know SQL that well, so the easiest way for me to do that was empty all of the tables and run whatever commands were in the backups. And that’s when my battery died. Yup, right after I pressed the button to run the SQL queries, it shut down on me. Someone’s gonna die!
Actually, I just switched over to Lisa’s laptop for a bit. I turned mine backup on long enough to recover the work I had done so that I could rerun everything on hers. And then the errors started rolling in. Ugh. Columns don’t match up here and there. Suddenly I’m backing up the fresh installs so that I can check for changes in the database structure. I had to do this a year or so ago in a similar situation with my beta install, so at least I had an idea what I was looking for.
It turns out that they had moved around a couple columns and removed the (rather useless) GeoURL info, but my database had never been updated properly. I’m not sure why, but them’s the brakes. Many search and replaces later, I got the backups for the main tables (posts, comments, categories, etc.) setup properly and imported them into a fresh install without a hitch. I left off some of the tables, so the unused accounts some friends had signed up for are gone (if that ever becomes useful, they’ll just be recreated anyway), and I’m starting from scratch on the links. In the meantime, at least it’s all running again (and possibly better than ever). But the moral of the story is… I’m a moron. Sorry, I can’t come up with anything better.
You’re not a moron – you’re a tinkerer and that makes you a geek as well.
Yeah, true. But there were a lot of other incidents to support the whole “moron” theory later in the week 😛