Site Issues - Maintenance


My hosting company updated the PHP software which drives my journal this morning, which unfortunately knocked me offline for a while. Because of some changes to the Wordpress software and because of some compatibility issues, there’s going to be some reduced functionality until I get it all sorted out.

Right now, all of my widgets are offline which is why things look pretty spartan here - but I’m trying to find a workaround and I’m doing some research on how to get things restored to full functionality.

This is going to be an interesting day…

Update 15:43 - Providing that my hosting company doesn’t decide to change anything else today unexpectedly, things have more or less been restored here in geishaland. I’m way too brain dead to go into it all right now… but I keep asking myself one question…

Why didn’t I go with Movable Type?
:getlost:

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October 16th, 2007
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Prospero
Posted on:
October 17, 2007 at 2:40 am

Oh, Nina. Movable Type has the same problems. My host moved my site to a “safer server” with a more recent version of the database software… and pretty much trashed my site. So, I’m just switched to SQL and MT4 and am rebuilding at 2:38 a.m. I feel your pain.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
nina aoki
Posted on:
October 17, 2007 at 2:32 pm

Hi Prospero!

Oh I’m sorry sweetie. That completely sucks. But, I’ve been there too.

I was lucky that my site crash happened during daylight hours and that I was already awake, but I started working on it around 8am yesterday and wasn’t done until about 4 in the afternoon.

What happened here was that my hosting company switched to PHPSuExec (which is more secure and allows better resource tracking) but it inadvertently broke every PHP call in the control software, causing server errors everywhere. That was a fairly easy PHPini fix, but then my MySQL database wasn’t encoding properly which turned out to be a Wordpress bug, and I despise having to debug someone else’s code!

That’s the problem with open source software, with every release it seems that something inevitably gets broken.

Good luck with the restoration!

xoxo,
nina

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Prospero
Posted on:
October 18, 2007 at 11:28 am

Ugh. Well, my blog is back online with the upgrades, except that it won’t do a full site rebuild without timing out. And that’s with the default MT design templates, not my own. Sadly, I don’t know anything about databases and little enough about my server to have no clue what could be them versus me. Grr.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
nina aoki
Posted on:
October 18, 2007 at 6:33 pm

Hi Prospero,

Well, I just sent you an email about some bugs I ran into when I was on your site and when I attempted to leave a comment there.

If you need to pick my brain about your database issues, get in touch with me. I’d be happy to offer you any help I can.

These things are incredibly frustrating when they happen. We put so much of ourselves into our sites and journals, and to see all of that work ruined because of a software upgrade is really annoying! Grr!

Perfect example is here: Wordpress just released version 2.3, but nothing I’m running now is compatible with the new release. If I were to upgrade to the new version, I’d have to build an entirely new template and completely change how I do things because the new version now incorporates widgets into the WP core (why they thought this was a good idea I have no clue) but that’s the reason I refuse to upgrade past the 2.1.x series. In fact, the last stable WP release that I actually liked was 2.0.6!

You see, what you see here in geishaland as a template is actually quite deceiving. The code is very spartan, but that also allows me to fully exploit the power of widgets to do everything else, which I like. Widgets are fantastic, and I can drag and drop things all over my site where ever I want them and it’s just that easy. Some people might not want that much flexibility so they go with something that has a lot of that built in, but they also sacrifice the ability to easily manipulate their data. I need that kind of flexibility, and if I were to upgrade my software I would have to completely change the way I do everything.

I’m assuming MT has similar issues. I have no idea why they don’t make their code backwards compatible. It makes no sense. With every new release they break a shitload of plugins and templates and it really, really sucks!

Okay, now I’ve vented! hahahaha! :biggrin:

Good luck!

xoxo,
nina