WordPress

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.

I thought I had it all worked out, but apparently not. I created a new install of WordPress, for various technical reasons, and redirected to that site. Unfortunately, the migration of data to the new version just didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Missing features, missing images, messed up database…bleh.

So for now we are back at the old version of the site, which seems to be working just like it always was. I apologize for any problems you may have had here in the last few days. I will test much more extensively before I try anything like that again.

Now that I’ve been blogging for awhile, I thought I’d post a bit about the process. I understand that many people come here without any interest in the mechanics of blogging. If so, then just skip this post. Others will be familiar enough with technical issues that all this will seem way too simple. Again, just skip the post. If I make any mistakes in attempting to explain this, however, I’m hope someone with more technical knowledge than I have will let me know.

I started out, lo these couple of years ago, using the free and easy Blogger service provided by Google. The old version of this blog is still there; I’ll probably get around to deleting it at some point. After a couple of months I got tired of the limitations imposed by blogspot. I had my own domain and host; after a little digging I discovered that my host would install WordPress with just a button press. WordPress imports posts from Blogger, so I installed it and had it do that. I then had to manually import all of my images. That was kind of a pain, but not hard to figure out. Read the rest of this entry »

To WordPress 2.3. Basic functionality is fine, but some features still not working. Sorry for any inconvenience.