The Lair

I finally got around to working towards those oft promised, but not yet delivered promises. Well, at least one of them. I started making tiny tweaks to this blog. Bear with me, if you will, while I recount the litany of disasters that was my lot for the day. I swear, someone up there wants me to do real work instead of futzing around with the blog.

So, I first made the CSS changes required for displaying gravatars on my site. I had the plugin installed and running for weeks, but hadn’t gotten off my lazy rearend and added the appropriate function calls to make the darn thing display. So far, so good. Made the CSS and PHP changes, tried to test.

Got a series of errors. Darn it. Tried visiting the site. Yep, the site is down. I procrastinate for about two months without actually using the plugin, get around to making the necessary changes today and the main site takes a dive. Nice.

Undeterred by this technological setback, I moved onto the next set of fixes. Some tweaks to the comment form. That works. I rejoice. Onto the next job. Replace my old tags plugin with a much cooler looking new kid. Alas, my celebrations were premature to the extreme. Too late, I discover that there is nothing compatible between these two plugins other than their function. I need to manually edit each post to add tags in the new form. Ick.

Well, I did consider the possibility of using SQL for this job, but decided that the old fashioned brute force method might be faster. Unfortunately, my webserver thought otherwise and started blocking me for a DOS attempt. Even nicer. My own webhost turned on me! So, I circumvent this anti-DOS measure and resume post updates.

Finish updating the posts and I discover the layout is screwed. Sidebars appearing all over the place (except in their intended position), general chaos and mayhem. So, obviously, I now need to hack the template. Awesome. Several hours of sporadic work (I had to do some real work in the interim) later, the last of the pesky layout bugs had vanished. I hope. People who don’t use Firefox may soon disabuse me of this fond hope. Right. We’ve hacked the template. Now to test the features of this cool new plugin.

And that’s when things went really pear shaped. It seems that the main hard disk on the server ran out of free space. Obviously, MySQL wasn’t a happy camper. MySQL unhappy -> Wordpress unhappy. Wordpress unhappy -> wannabe tester (ie: moi) very unhappy. See where this is headed ? And this is how I managed (through overly quick clicking) to change my MySQL password into a completely random set of characters. Lovely. Now all the database connections fail, because the password is umm .. err .. different.

It gets better, folks. I decide (well, after much gnashing of teeth and tugging of hair) that the password needed to be changed anyway. I settle down to make the changes in the Wordpress install. Whoops. Remember that full hard disk ? No file edits work. Doh. So, I now have a new MySQL password; no way to change it back without resorting to command line hackery, no way to change the Wordpress install to the new password (because the files cannot be edited). Fun, innit ?

Several hours later (well, it seemed like that), some sanity and free space on the hard disk had been found. I discover that MySQL has locked up most of the database tables, so I spend a few minutes repairing each one. Then, I start … uh .. testing the functionality. And uh .. it doesn’t work. The killer feature for which I migrated from one tagging plugin to another does not work. Frustrated ? Me ? Bwahahaha. That’s like calling Tantalus mildly hungry.

I think I’m going to retreat homewards before the sky falls on me or something.

Update: Oh, wait. More good news. UTW just got an upgrade to 2.5.1 while I was futzing around trying to install 2.5.0. Has anyone heard of the following Slashdot cliche ? When anyone announces a new product release, an obligatory comment follows. “But I just finished downloading/installing the earlier version“. Well, maybe the new release fixes my tag intersection problem. I live in hope.

Update 2: Gravatars can be fixed. The domain (gravatar.com) is still down as of this update at 0900GMT. However, replacing all calls to gravatar.com with http://64.124.231.223/ (the IP address) will work. And also, the tag intersection problem I experienced with UTW was sorted out after upgrading to 2.5.1 Life is good.