The Upgrade Saga

Fidget turned 3 last week. It’s been a great way to share my thoughts and photos with family out of the area and I still get a thrill when local friends tell my they’ve read my blog. Thanks for taking an interest, everybody! The following tale may not interest anyone except me, but I wanted to write down the process I went through during  the last few weeks of moving, backing up, and upgrading this blog.

When I first set up the blog I made the mistake of naming the folder with an uppercase F. The Internet is case-sensitive so whenever I was telling someone my blog address I felt I had to mention that the F was required. This minor irritation increased a few notches when I recently entered some photos of hats that I’ve knitted in Annie Modesitt’s 1000 Fabulous Knit Hats project. I was filling out the paperwork, and typing my web address on the form. I looked at that capital F and thought, what if my images get selected for the book? what if the person entering data forgets to hit shift-F? what if a broken link to my website is out in PRINT?

So I decided to move the blog. Not far, just into a different folder.

Right around the same time, just before I actually did the move, the blog broke and I couldn’t save or publish any new posts or pages or even edit existing posts or pages. I was pretty sure that this didn’t have anything to do with the directory move, partly because I noticed the issue before I did it but also because it wasn’t giving me any kind of error message, just jumping to the home page and pretending it had never seen what I had just typed. This was a lot bigger of an issue than a bunch of broken links that I feared I’d have to deal with between F and f. I tried tweaking the file permissions with no results. I realized I would have to upgrade to the newest version of WordPress, since it had been 3 years and they’ve made a lot of changes since then.

What did your cyber-mother always tell you? BACK UP YOUR DATABASE. So I did that, using the handy plugin that I’d installed in WordPress. I’d done that many times before, in fact. But, could I actually restore from the backup? I’d never done that part before and I figured I should make sure my backup would be worth something before I forged ahead with the upgrade.

That was when things started to get really horrifying.

I found instructions in the WordPress documentation about using phpMyAdmin, the interface provided by most web hosts to manipulate one’s database. When I performed a backup this way, it was a disconcertingly small 15MB – disconcerting because the file I’d gotten via the plugin was 100MB! Even more troubling – when I tried to restore from the big-file backup, it wouldn’t take. File size too darn big.

After a lot of frantic thrashing around, which included several trouble tickets with my host, a side trip into the php.ini file to increase the allowed upload filesize (didn’t help); and wondering if I would lose most of the comments on my 3 years worth of posts, the following became clear to me:

Every single spam comment that ever showed up in my moderation queue has been stored on the database for the past 3 years. Yikes! Talk about a wake-up call. I had no idea that when I clicked “moderate as: spam” it actually meant “keep this” rather than “toss it, NOW!” It would be like suddenly discovering that your basement was full of every single bottle and can you thought you had sent to the recycle bin during the last 3 years.

Mixed in with those 100MB of spam comments (the rest of the content was a paltry >1MB) were comments from my family and friends that I wanted to keep! But, thankfully, my web host was able to restore all 100MB for me so that I could start fresh and try to get rid of all that excess baggage.

In a miracle of Internet information serendipity, I found a video that was so helpful, so clear, and so relevent that it seemed it had been made for me. Once I (little ol’ me!) went into phpMyAdmin and – get this – used an SQL query to clean up my comments table, my entire site was a bit over 1MB. Sigh. of. relief. (Know what else? Maybe the reason I couldn’t make any new posts was the database was feeling full. No more new stuff for you, lady, not till you clear out this packrat’s paradise of a comments table!!!)

Then, I followed the Worpress upgrade instructions. That went off without a hitch. I love the new version – I can control how my sidebar is set up, and the whole control panel system is way better. I installed an anti-spam plugin, a stats plugin (how many people have viewed this post?) and of course the backup plugin. (Just because I now know how to do a few things in phpMyAdmin doesn’t mean I want to hang out there all the time!) I even came full circle on the file directory move – I did a find-and-replace on the /F to /f and also put a helpful re-direct page on the /Fidget URL.

Next stop: theme design. I think I’ll go for an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach. Keep your eyes peeled for new framing images.