Resurrecting Old Posts Brings a Smile, and Some Shudders
(Holy Leap Year, Batman!)
I’ve stated many times I hate WordPress upgrades. I know the sponsors have tried to make it easier over time, but upgrades are still painful, wrought with risk and error, and always force me to research and figure out what went wrong.
Why the Upgrade?
I last upgraded to WP v. 2.2.1, and with a real rant to accompany it.
Since then, some of us had been seeing some insidious stuff getting inserted into our RSS feeds, but had not been able to stem it. Then, I was doing my normal morning systems check and saw that my site was completely down, completely blank. Grrrr. Who knows what that specific problem was.
Version 2.3.3. had been announced with a fix for the RSS feed spam problem, so, rather than trying to diagnose and fix my current version, it was time to upgrade. (Grrrr.)
But, then I realized, possibly by doing so, I might also see a fix to a longstanding issue I had had with plug-ins somehow limiting my chronological listing of past posts. (Hooray!) That one had really been sticking in my craw, had caused me to de-activate some plug-ins I thought useful, and had led to only a handful of prior posts appearing.
The Benefits (sort of)
So, the upgrade was made. Sadly, no problems (other than the XML-RPC implementation issue) were solved. And, unfortunately, my chronological listings still only displayed when throttled back to the past 30 or so. (Grrrr.)
Well, s**t. So after (for what was for me, with some of my more complicated site aspects) nearly a two hour minor upgrade, the only real benefit I or my readers would see is that the site was no longer blank! This hardly looked like a good deal.
So, assuming the chronology problem fix was not near at hand, I decided to manually add the past entries back to my chronology page. (Actually, this sounds worse than it really is since I have learned some quick tricks for gleaning listings from other sites; I just turned those techniques on my own blog!). While grinding teeth to nubs, I did what everyone who works intimately with software often does: I did the workaround.
So, now all full listings have been restored (though still with some recent postings overlap; Grrrr).
What brought a smile was seeing some posts from a year or two ago that I liked and had completely forgotten; some others brought a shudder. Here are some older personal favorites:
- What is the Structured Web?
- An Intrepid Guide to Ontologies
- Eat Your Greens: FOAF and SIOC are Good for You
- Structure Paves the Way to the Semantic Web
- “Long Tails” Have “Teeny Heads” (or is it vice versa?)
- No Database? No Problem!
- The Semantic Web Rocks!
- Trying ‘Web Scientist’ on for Size
- A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Semantic Web (as updated with now correct video, Whew! Hyperland is Back!)
- The Biggest Disruption in History: Massively Accelerated Growth Since the Industrial Revolution
- Sources and Classification of Semantic Heterogeneities
- Climbing the Data Federation Pyramid
- Why Are $800 Billion in Document Assets Wasted Annually? V. Summary
- Extensibility: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
- The “Lottery Syndrome” and Recent Open Source Statistics
- Open Source and the ‘Business Ecosystem’
- Open Source Business Models
Nonetheless, now all 250 or so posts on my site from Day 1 in early 2005 can now be seen again; it has been awhile! 🙂
The Problems
Naturally, that was not the end of the saga.
After making the upgrade, I noticed that all category listings and lookups had been wiped off my blog. I could see them in the MySQL and the editor still had the listing, but the site itself and the admin panel were blank.
Grrrr. (Try to stay calm and not panic.)
It’s another one of those deals where it is time to search like crazy and hope that someone more knowledgable than me has encountered the same problem and fixed it. Sure enough, in an obscure reference, I got the glimmer that maybe re-starting MySQL could fix the problem.
Well, it did. But go figure. . . .
Advanced TinyMCE
Thankfully, my Advanced TinyMCE plug-in that gives more editing functions works great for me in WP v. 2.3.3. At least that is a relief!
And so, we end on an anti-Grrrr note. 🙂 Sweet dreams.
