Monday 24 December 2007

Those of you who haven’t been around the last couple of days missed the meltdown. Let’s say the dust has settled, though I haven’t swept it up yet, so I’m going to remove the alarming message from the front page of Lothere and move the info over here.

What I did

The initial booboo was in accidentally clicking the wrong button while managing my domains, and moving the www​.lothere​.com domain to point to a different location on my Web host — where there was nothing. This takes a few hours for the update to go through, and would have taken a few more if I had switched it back, so I decided to go ahead and just move everything there.

Why have I not yet learned the folly of saying to myself “As long as I am doing FOO I might as well go all the way and do BAR” whenever I am within ten feet of a computer? :cry:

This is something I have been meaning to do anyway, since until now I have been faking it <technospeak>by hosting the site on www​.unfor​get​ting​.com and using mod_​rewrite to redirect www​.lothere​.com to the /​lothere directory.</technospeak> This change will allow me to get better stats about where my visitors are coming from, and it will make things easier if I ever wanted to transfer to a different host entirely.

However, I have no way of moving files from one directory to another on that server, so I was stuck re-​​uploading everything. Including all those thousands of images. That took hours.

Also, as long as I am doing FOO I upgraded WordPress to the 2.3 branch, which will allow me to install some of the more recent plugins.

I won’t even get into all the meta-​​technospeak about SSH and Cygwin and Eclipse and all the other as long as I am doing BAZ stuff I foolishly got myself into while doing all this. :cry: And the UTF-​​8 /​ LATIN1 character encoding death-​​match going on within and between the MySQL servers… :cry::cry::cry:

What came out of it

All you really need to know is this, in a bulleted list à la Powerpoint format:

  • New version of WordPress means (hopefully) more robust, more secure, faster site, as well as the ability to add some cool plugins
  • New Advanced Search feature, which is still ugly as all get-​​out but seems to work if you can find the input fields.
  • Now you can edit your comments within 30-​​minutes after posting them. I don’t get a second email if you edit your comment, though, and I often only read comments via email, so if you have an important question to add, better just post a second comment so I’ll be sure to see it.
  • I think I have fixed character encoding issues so French accented characters, etc., should be correct now. I haven’t yet fixed some of the elven language dialog, because off-​​hand I could not remember what vowels were which, but you can’t read elven anyway.
  • I added a favicon for the lothere​.com domain. (Little image that should be appearing in your address bar next to the URL.) I’m not crazy about it, but I was getting too confused keeping track of whether I was on the live site or my local copy, and a favicon was an easy way to tell the tabs apart in Firefox.

I haven’t added the comment-​​editing feature into Verso yet, and as I said, there is still some dust to sweep up, but I really want to get back to the story!

If anyone has any problems using the new site or new features, please leave comments below.

UTF-​​8 makes angels cry :cry:

UTF-8 makes angels cry.