Working on the guts of this site

I’m work­ing on some changes to the under­ly­ing tech­ni­cal struc­ture of this site. So far, I have switched the data­base from MySQL ver­sion 4 to ver­sion 5. That seems to have gone sur­pris­ingly well so far (given my lim­ited tech­ni­cal skills), and the site is load­ing much more quickly.

Next, I will attempt to clean a bunch of old, unused tables out of the data­base. That may cause some prob­lems with the blog and I may have to restore from backups.

I apol­o­gize for any prob­lems over the next cou­ple of days. I’ve been avoid­ing this for a long time, but it really has to be done if this site is to work the way it’s sup­posed to. Please let me know if you have any prob­lems with the site.

Thanks.

Updates

24 April 2009: So far, so good. The blog is run­ning a lot faster now. I’ve recov­ered some recent com­ments that were in the data­base, but had become invis­i­ble. The archives page is now dis­play­ing prop­erly. All the posts and other stuff seem to work correctly.

2 May 2009: Still work­ing fine (he writes while super­sti­tiously knock­ing wood to ban­ish the aveng­ing spir­its of tempted fate). I wish I’d done this a long time ago, as it was much eas­ier than I thought it would be.