End of month maintenance
I’ve had a good evening of upgrading without damage. PHP, a whole round of blog plugins, my wiki. All without that sinking feeling that follows damage to a working system. I’ll sleep better tonight.
There’s still one little river to cross, though. My blog theme is an older model, and the author had dropped “off the map” for a while. Website gone to pasture, with nothing but clickable ads. Code that doesn’t respond well in the presence of newer versions. Despair. I did track the author down today and send off a message that a few of us have a trainwreck on the horizon, but he lives on another continent, so I’ll see if the answer comes along.
Meanwhile, I’ve been tinkering in PHP code. I understand the problem better now than two days ago; the database structure has changed, and the calls are aimed at variables that no longer exist. Makes sense. I’ve pared and resorted the paragraphs, so that I can now predict how “broken” a page will be, but the fix isn’t in.
WordPress has moved on to a new version that works well if I change themes; not so well if I don’t. There is no pressing need to upgrade, but half the fun in this virtual world is the bleeding edge part – I just don’t choose to bleed today. With March Break only days away, I am putting this one on hold for a rainy day (unless the author gets in touch; then, all bets are off). I will try to be satisfied with all the other minor improvements I’ve made on both servers since suppertime.
Boy, did this month go by quickly!
