ricketyclick

Ow! Ow! Ow!

That did not go well.

Several problems settled in at once, resulting in ricketyclick being more rickety than clickety. All fixed now.

I am now going to take my blog in my hands and attempt to update again, this time from 2.9.1 to 3.0. I’ll be using the built in WordPress update instead of Fantastico!

Please stand by again….

[update]

OK, backed up and deactivated plugins…

[update]

OK, update to 3.0 complete.

I’ll be turning the plugins back on now….

[Update]

…And the plugins aren’t just blowing up in my face.

[update]

I will now be playing with the Visual editor, which has not worked well in past versions.

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For instance, let’s see how it deals with hard-coded html….

And let’s try a list:

1. Item one
2. Item two
3. Item three

OK…save

Right off, it disturbed the formatting on my horizontal rule. Blegh.

Switching to HTML mode…

Typing in a manual list…

• Item a
• Item b
• Item c

Switching to Visual then HTML again….

HM, that actually didn’t go too badly. In some previous versions, swapping back and forth turned HTML tags into special characters. Didn’t happen this time.

Unless I need a HR, I guess I’ll be sticking with the Visual editor for awhile.

Now for media insertions….
Urk…can’t upload to my content directory…let me check permissions….

Trying again….

OK, that’s fixed. Let’s try a big one…Never mind. I was hoping there’d be an option for inserting the picture sized to fit the column. Nope. Now let’s try flash…

Ah…not quite what I had in mind…but OK. I can work with that.

OK, I’m calling this successful.

Moving on with my life.

The server that Ricketyclick lives on has old versions of mySQL and PHP. The way to upgrade them is for Hosting Matters to move me to a new server.

I’ve asked to have that done. This involves pointing DNS to the new machine, so it may take a bit for the links to propagate.

I’ll post when it’s complete.

[update 2008 03 02]
OK, it looks like the move was successful, and while it took awhile for all the DNS caches between HM and myself to refresh, it seems things are working fine.

Once again, I thank Hosting Matters for their quick support of someone flying by the seat of his pants.

[additional info]
After the move was complete, I noticed that although cpanel showed PHP was up to date, mySQL was still stale. I was told that cpanel was just showing it wrong, but a bit more digging showed there are two parts to mySQL. The phpMyAdmin page shows the server version as 5.0.45, while the mySQL client version is 4.1.22. The cpanel page must be reporting the client version.

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Oh, and I updated WordPress as well; there was a crucial security update I was lacking. I would have done it earlier, but for some reason the Fantastico! installation package wasn’t showing up in cpanel; that turned out to be just a link that went missing when cpanel was updated some time back, which Annette restored for me.

Anyway, it all works, and I’m calling it done.

I’ve been running version 2.0.1 of WordPress, since that’s what Hosting Matters had when I started. I finally decided to update to 2.0.4, since there’s apparently been some substantial security fixes, plus some ordinary bugs and maybe a feature or two.

It turns out that Fantistico, the application management script Hosting Matters offers, knows that I needed to update, and offered to do it for me. (Thanks to Pat for pointing out that Fantastico has this facility.)

So I backed up my entire site, using the backup tool in CPANEL. Then I installed the WordPress backup plugin, and tried to run that. Unfortunately, it stalled, saying it was unable to create the backup directory–it didn’t have adequate permissions. I opened up the permissions on the requisite directory, and tried again. It worked this time, and I tightened up the permissions again.

Then I told Fantistico to run the update:

Click on Upgrade only if
- no files, languages, themes have been modified
- you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress
Info: Your current installation will be backed up.

No, I hadn’t made any changes or mods, but I’m disturbed to find that if I had, they’d be overwritten. I don’t know if this is a side-effect of Fantistico, or if applying the update via any mechanism would do the same (I suspect it would).

I was a bit worried that plug-ins would be deleted, but decided to take a chance, since I’d only done the one for backup.

Upgrading…

Initializing Parameters – Done.
Generating MySQL Backup – Done.
Generating Files Backup – Done.
Copying New Files – Done.

Upgrade completed

Your installation of WordPress was upgraded.
You can view it here: http://ricketyclick.com/blog/

Please save following information. You will need it in order to restore if something went wrong

If you don’t have SSH access, ask support to help you:
- Remove the directory [path]public_html/blog
- Untar [path]/blog.backup.1160156160.tgz
- Empty the database rickety_wrdp1
- Import the file [path]backup.sql into the database rickety_wrdp1
- Move [path]/blog to [path]public_html/blog

Nice to give you restore instructions, but it would have been nicer still if there was a restore option that would do all this automatically.

The only difference I’ve noted is that the blue banner is not as nice as the old one. I liked the rounded corners. Why did they have to change that?

And that’s exactly the sort of thing I’d've changed if I had tinkered at all. This means that if I’d put in a customized header, or made other layout changes, they’d all be gone now. I’m glad now I accepted a stock install. But now I won’t bother to try to tinker.

Good, I guess. One more thing I can strike from my list of stuff I’ll never really get around to doing…

[update]
Huh, now that I’ve restarted, I see the original banner is back in all its rounded, shaded goodness. What the hey…?