Two things tonight that have me going “argh.”
1. Something has happened to the database of the PDF Media section (the part of the site that shows video to folks reading Phosphor Dot Fossils. I’m not even sure what happened. I’m trying to restore from a three-week-old backup of the database; I haven’t added anything new in a while, so that should bring it back up to speed.
2. Two recent attempts to update Scribblings to the latest version of WordPress have failed. Miserably. A little bit of asking around and reading has yielded the answer to this problem: two plugins that I use or have used (namely the Livejournal crossposter and the now-out-of-use “Now Reading” thingie) add non-standard stuff to the database without adding new tables to organize it. In other words…I can’t update it, because any new version of WordPress is going to choke on the oddball database crap. So I’m left with either the current WP install (of which more in a moment), or starting from scratch on Scribblings – porting every entry and every comment over, piece by piece, post by post. I’ve got enough of that to do with my goal of getting Bookbag and PDF all in database form by the end of this year. It’s enough to make me seriously consider giving up on the blog altogether, as infrequently as it’s updated. Okay, so I probably won’t do that, but I’m extremely discouraged. What’s the point?
As for why upgrading the Scribblings WP install is such a priority: my current method of fighting spam has proven to be cumbersome on my end, and on yours (I hate that everyone has to pass a captcha – and in any case, it doesn’t captcha everything). I have so many common words in my “do not allow” list – stuff like “insurance” and “loans” and so on – that it’s made actual conversation here nearly impossible. Any comments that contain a word on that list are automatically dumped and are not held for approval. (I have the “do not allow” list as crowded as I do because I just don’t have the time to wade through a list of comments held for approval that has 3,000 items on it…every day.) Akismet doesn’t seem to be inclined to play nice with my apparently screwy old WP install, so once again, it’s extremely discouraging.
I like the little blawg here enough that I don’t want to let the terrorists, er, sorry, spammers win, and besides, you people need someplace you can rely on to provide your fix of baby/cat/baby+cat photos. But man, would it be dandy if it wasn’t a huge pain in the ass right now.
I had similar problems during the last round of WordPress updates. I finally decided to just hold my breath, upgrade, and wade through the errors afterwards. The biggest problem I personally experienced was a lot of my old posts ended up with no category. They were still there and you could find them, but they lost their category code. Fixing this was a matter of searching for old posts, editing them, and sticking them back in the category. I hope that fixing this problem fixes my database from here on out. If I have errors with the next round of upgrades, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I disabled most of my old plug-ins anyway.