No Clue Incorporated

I hate computers.  I hate hardware.  I hate software.  One thing they seem to have in common, is that they can work one minute, and not the next.  The sudden change of my paragraphs not working is a great example of this delemma.  I hadn’t messed with the internal settings of the blog for months and all of a sudden I notice it won’t put paragraph breaks in.  The older posts were fine as long as I didn’t re-edit them and save, which would strip out the breaks.  Horribly upsetting.

So today I put a little time into upgrading the blog.  I noticed on my site’s admin console that I could let it upgrade it automatically.  I knew all my customizations would be blown away, but oh well.  I couldn’t remember what files I had customized and which I hadn’t.

The first wonderful upgrade problem I encountered was that the blog could no longer access the database.  I’d long ago forgotten the password, so I blasted the old account and created a new.  Then I noticed most of the plugins were no longer working.  Spent most of my upgrade time mucking around with those.  Deleted a few, figuring if I had need for them in the future, I’d refigure out how to set them up again.  Most important to me is the “On this day” and “Related post” functionality.  The “On this day” continued to work (or at least show up), but the “Related post” were gone because of the overlayed files.  I found a newer version that was supposed to magically work without editing any files.  So I downloaded that, blew away the old, and uploaded the new.  I finally got it appearing on single post views.  I refigured out to make it show up on the multi-post front page.  It’s supposed to show up via RSS also, but I’m not seeing it and am tired of mucking about.

All in all, it’s taken around 2 hours to get things back working, which isn’t real bad.  As soon as I post this, I’ll see whether I still have the paragraph break problem, which I shouldn’t!  If not, I’ll reedit the couple posts that it affected.  However, a new wonderful annoyance that I see is an accented capital A appearing in all my previous posts.  The upgrade had to do something to the database and indeed, that characters appears there when I look at the raw data.  So one more thing I’ll have to do some research in.  If anybody knows how to represent that character in a SQL script to remove it, let me know.

Update: The paragraph break hiccup appears to be fixed.  I’ll fix the other two posts shortly.  :)

Another Update:  Sweet!  The related posts are now appearing in the RSS feed.  My searching has revealed nothing about the accented A character appearing.

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

For some reason, this stupid blog is not honoring my paragraph breaks on the last couple of posts.  I apologize for the ugliness of that and will hopefully figure something out.

On this day…

• 2009: Grosser than gross — In a Burger King bathroom just off exit 2 of the Ohio Turnpike, this event transpired while I was drying [...]
• 2008: All good things must end — A few weeks ago, we took the field for our final game of the fall soccer season.  On the line [...]

The good news is we’re at least over half way through this blogging blackout.

The bad news is I still don’t have time to start putting out proper posts.

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

A couple months back I put some time in to tinker with the old blog and then forgot to mention it.  I installed a couple plugins.  The first one shows what it thinks are related posts for a current post on the front page.  I don’t know what it uses to gauge what’s similiar but I thought this might be a way to get some older posts popping up.  If it uses tags and categories then none of the older posts will probably show up, since that wasn’t retained when I salvaged them from the old blog.

Another plugin shows recent comments that have been made on a post.  The comments show up on the main page.  One problem I’ve seen with blogs is when I make a comment, I usually don’t remember to go back and check if there was any response.  I’ve seen the same problem on my blog when I respond to someones comment that they don’t check back.  Now maybe they’ll be able to see at a glance if anyone’s responded.

The  final plugin is probably my favorite.  It’s kind of a “this day in history” type thing where it will show posts I’ve made on this day in the past.  I find it very entertaining to see what I was thinking a year or three ago.

One bad thing is this all only shows up on the main page.  If you go to a page showing a single post, none of this stuff will show.  I’ll have to dig into my template sometime to see if I can make the related posts and the sidebar appear when your viewing a single post.

Of course, if you’re reading this through the RSS feed, you won’t see any of this.  That’s one thing I miss since using Google Reader.  Some blogs I read show how many comments are on a post but most do not.

On this day…

• 2006: Finally — Tonight begins another installment of a weekend of gaming. I’m so excited, I’m foaming at the mouth. I [...]
• 2005: The second last snow of the winter — I saw in the paper the other day that the NHL players association and league were actually going to get [...]