In At The Deep End

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.

Sorry if you’ve been having trouble or strange error messages looking at the site in the last week or so. I’m not sure what the problem was, but my blog was hogging the database shared with other people on the same server and so the administrator clobbered the blog until I could sort it out.

The only thing I could think of doing was upgrading to the most recent versions of WordPress and Spam Karma I could - please let me know if it goes wobbly for you, and sorry again if it’s been a pain.

Inspired by the selection of smilies over at Making it Up, I’ve expanded the range of smilies on this blog (by pinching theirs). So, if you’ve been frustrated that you couldn’t put a little waving person or a Pacman drinking a pint of Guinness to express yourself properly, your day is a little nicer.

In case you’re interested (and you’re able to fiddle about the innards of your blog, and your blog is powered by Wordpress) here’s how to do it.

1. First, catch your smilies. Do this by visiting them in your browser and doing Save Image As, which is probably on the menu you get when you right-click. Save them to your hard disk.
2. Put them onto the computer that hosts your blog, into the wp-includes/images/smilies folder, where you’ll already have things like icon_eek.gif.
3. Take a copy of wp-includes/vars.php, just in case things go pear-shaped.
4. Edit vars.php. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see an obvious list that shows smilies or magic text going to a .gif file. Add to this list so that new magic text goes to the new .gif files.
5. Test it out in a new post. If you’re happy you can get rid of the back-up of vars.php.
6. Smilie-tastic!

I know, I know, I can’t stop fiddling. The blog is now in its permanent home, with hopefully everything working as it did before. If you notice anything wrong or broken I’d be grateful if you let me know. What I thought would be a 5 minute job ended up taking 2 and a half hours, and involved minor brain surgery on the Wordpress database tables - grrr… MySQL auto-commit grrr… (Gory details available only on request.) I now have a better idea of what to do if I ever have to do this kind of thing again, and it showed how nicely put together WordPress is internally - all this for free !

The good news is that you end up one step further forward than you started, so you have to take heart in that. Bit of a theme for yesterday and today:

• Yesterday J and I started catching up with the World Cup scores and putting them on our wall chart. Then by the power of maths we started to work out who had qualified from the group stages (yes, we were behind). This went really well, although we ran out of time after two groups. I think that J got a lot out of it as he saw there was a point to doing the sums. Tonight when I tried to do a bit more he was too tired after the afternoon’s bouncing, so we managed one more group with some effort. If I take a step back from the extra effort required, he’s still done maths more willingly than he has for a while.

• After Jax and Kath pointed out Sage to me, I switched to it rather than using Bloglines to keep track of my RSS feeds. I love the auto-discovery thing, and the fact that it just works. One thing I miss from Bloglines is being able to tell it to hide feeds with nothing new on them.

• The final forward/back (then forward again) was with the site. Ho hum. I expect I’ll get it just so eventually. I’d found out what the real problem was - when you turn on nice permalinks in Wordpress (that don’t have question marks and random numbers in) Wordpress updates the .htaccess files behind your site for you to tell Apache (the web server) to use one of its groovy features (mod_rewrite) to turn ugly permalinks into spiffy ones. Strangely it assumes that part of the turn-on-grooviness instructions are already there and doesn’t bother adding them.

  If you have an incomplete set of instructions Apache gets confused and your site disappears. Having sussed all this out, I fiddled with the site this morning before work and turned it all on and checked I could see the site. Hurrah! Nice permalinks! When I came to blog at lunchtime I discovered I couldn’t - same problem as before, but this time limited to just the Wordpress admin stuff. I then realised that the admin stuff lives in its own directory on the server, which has its own .htaccess file, and I hadn’t added the missing bit of the instruction to that one (just to the main one for people reading the blog). I couldn’t do anything about it as I can only fettle at home. I’ve now fixed it all, and it’s all lovely and shiny, at least until I try to do the next bit of cleverness.

Sorry if you’ve been unable to look at the site recently - probably just yesterday. The short version is: I clicked the wrong button and fouled things up. (Long version available on request.) Thanks to help from my ISP I’ve got it fixed at least temporarily. I’m still not sure that the RSS feed is working OK though - I use bloglines to keep on top of blogs I read and it has never told me about things we’ve posted. Has RSS worked / not worked for you?

An unrelated bit of good news: yesterday Katy bought me a Bagpuss video that includes the episode with the machine that makes chocolate biscuits out of butter beans and breadcrumbs. My favourite! Professor Yaffle as hard-charging investigative journalist. The mice’s ruse is exposed!

We have finally got around to sorting out a blog, which will be about all sorts of things, but mostly family life, home education and so on. I don’t know how often it will be updated, and how long we’ll keep this up - I haven’t managed to keep other blogs particularly alive.

If you don’t have the password for any password-protected posts please send one or other of us an email.