Do I cut the red wire or the blue wire, Lassie?
Phew! I’ve now migrated 2 blogs (this one and a pretty dead one) to WordPress 2.6.1. Hooray! It was a much bigger job than usual because my run-by-friends-of-a-friend-in-their-spare-time ISP hadn’t upgraded the MySQL database software beyond version 3.23! I had done all the steps in the WordPress upgrade instructions and clicked on the upgrade database link, and then got the error: WordPress 2.6.1 needs MySQL 4.0.0. 
To give them their due, they set up a MySQL 5.0 database for me very quickly. But that was an empty database, so I had to schlep all the data from the old database to the new one, without any nice tools like phpMyAdmin 
Oh, and I couldn’t do it all in one go because I got weird out-of-space messages.
Because I exhibit the weird obsessive laziness of the geek, I had to write some scripts to save time (I will only actually save time if I remember to run them each time I upgrade), and because I’m rusty I had to look up shell scripting and some MySQL. (Yeah, really quick. The documentation was good, but I was v. rusty.)
Anyway, enough rambling. Katy took the children off to this Celtic place today, and they all came back tired but happy. (K and L came back with painted faces too - K’s was excellent.) I haven’t bothered to upload photos yet, but will in the next day or so.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
All swished straight over my head but I remain extremely grateful that you know what you’re doing and what all that means :). Thanks again.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
OOh got an odd error message when I submited that comment but it obviously did go through even so.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
you know, I’ve never got into that level of laziness, mainly because I’ve not done shell scripting unless you count the stuff we used to do on OS/2 (which is probably closely related, but still not something I want to revisit).
So was it red or blue?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
you missed a table:
bob.sk2_blacklist doesn’t exist.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I hope it’s happier now - I’ve added the missing table, with its data from the old version of things. Err, I think it was blue.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
That is the sort of thing that dh does, and it drives me CRAZY!
I am convinced that it really would be a lot quicker just to stick the stuff in. But then I’m only a half techy geek……
August 27th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
A good programmer is never happier than when writing programmes to help them write programmes
August 28th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I’ve of course tinkered with it now, so I just point the script at a directory containing the WordPress wp-config.php file and it extracts the database log-in info and the prefix for the table names, logs in to the db, dumps all the data from the tables that start with the magic prefix plus sk2_blacklist - each table going to a separate file, then compresses each file.
Future versions might make a decent cup of tea and tidy children’s bedrooms, but that might take a bit of work.