Raph's Website » Blog seems functional again

Blog seems functional again

March 24th, 2008 (Visited 6820 times) Tags: upgrade, wordpress

You may have noticed the blog being partially inoperative this weekend. Well, it seems to be back. We’ll see how it goes during the day.

The background: on Friday or Saturday I attempted to log into the admin dashboard only to be told that I had to upgrade my database. I assumed it was because my host was forcing me to go from the old 2.1.x version to the newer 2.3.3 version which has a lot of security fixes. Well, I clicked the “upgrade” link, it didn’t work, and then the dashboard became inaccessible. I got stuck in the endless upgrade loop described here.

I then spent two days trying forced and manual upgrades to 2.3.3, 2.2, and every number in between. Looked like it was always timing out when trying to update things. While I wasat it, though, I also uploaded the images for the new theme that I have been messing with — so at least there was a new look.

Morgan suggested forcing a database upgrade, which I didn’t see the point of, given that said upgrade is exactly what was failing each time. But it did make me go look at the value of the db_version field in the wp_options table. Which was “1″ instead of what it should be. I changed it manually to 4773, and the upgrade link succeeded, and now it’s at 5183 (which is correct since we are currently running 2.2.3). So thanks, Morgan!

Tonight perhaps, I will try finishing the job and going all the way to 2.3.3. In the meantime, you may notice that some blog functionality is missing — translation, for example. Most of it is just commented out, and I will have to dig into the PHP for the sidebars to bring it back. The new theme is supposed to have a bunch of stuff rearranged, but I suspect it makes no sense to do that until I get to the latest version.

Post here if you see any obviously broken stuff, please!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Gamedev Planet wrote on March 24th, 2008 at 4:24 pm:

Blog seems functional againPosted on March 24, 2008 by Raph

Yard Host wrote on March 24th, 2008 at 4:51 pm:

nobody@flickr.com (b5ml)wrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt I assumed it was because my host was forcing me to go from the old 2.1.x version to the newer 2.3.3 version which has a lot of security fixes. Well, I clicked the “upgrade” link, it

Ryan Shwayder’s Nerfbat » Bloginati wrote on March 28th, 2008 at 5:34 pm:

Raph’s Website »Blog seems functional again

Bloggers | The Cesspit. wrote on March 27th, 2008 at 1:21 am:

[...] is also a game designer or [...] Source: Nerfbat – Grouchy Gnome Categories: Bloggers 16:15 Blog seems functional again You may have noticed the blog being partially inoperative this weekend. Well, it seems to be back. [...]

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 7:16 am:

Oh — and I approved some 30-odd comments that were caught in the moderation queue.

Patch said on March 24th, 2008 at 8:40 am:

It looks like the permalink pages are looking in the “wp-mobile” theme directory rather than “raph_blog_3″ for style.css, which means that the pages look relatively unstyled, and the box in which I’m typing this comment is rather narrow.

This might be one of those things that is going to get rearranged once you fully upgrade and fix the theme; apologies if I’m pointing out something that you already know.

Patch said on March 24th, 2008 at 8:44 am:

… and fixed as I posted my comment. That was fast

Patch said on March 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am:

Weird. It was posting a comment that ‘fixed’ the issue I am now triple-posting about. Your comments pages/permalinks look fine in the browser that I’m using to goof off and post to this thread (Firefox on Ubuntu), which is now signed in to WP, but not fine in a browser that isn’t signed in (IE7 in a Windows VM, for example). Not sure why Word Press is serving up “mobile” content to people without a cookie, but that seems to be what’s happening. That sounds like it’ll be fun to troubleshoot and fix …

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 9:03 am:

It might just be cached — I use WP-Cache. I’ll blow it away and see if that makes a difference.

Patch said on March 24th, 2008 at 9:05 am:

Yep. That was it. All fixed now

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 9:24 am:

Cafepress shop header should be visually the same as everything else now.

Kerri Knight said on March 24th, 2008 at 9:34 am:

Admit it, you’re just trying to avoid real work the day after Easter! :9

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 9:55 am:

Actually, my wife fixed the Shop header.

Michael Chui said on March 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am:

DST is unaccounted for. I just posted a comment from Seattle and it showed up as 11:47am.

Morgan Ramsay said on March 24th, 2008 at 1:21 pm:

Raph wrote:

So thanks, Morgan!

Para que son los amigos? (No hablo español.)

I think each version of WordPress will have you upgrade the database even if the only “upgrade” to the database is the changing of the database version number. There will be actual schema changes when updating from WordPress 2.3.x to the upcoming WordPress 2.5. By the way, you might consider installing WampServer so you can mess with a non-live version of your website.

Wolfgang Wozniak said on March 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm:

Spiffy new layout?

I see the new blueish banner.

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 5:17 pm:

Yes — if you all clear your cache, it will show up immediately — if not, it will show up eventually. The blog should be all blue and light.

There will be more coming though — lots of sidebar cleaning is on the horizon.

Morgan Ramsay said on March 24th, 2008 at 6:37 pm:

The theme feels wintery to me. Cold, unwelcoming, and dreary—completely opposite you, Raph!

If you changed your logo to a penguin with the icon emblazoned on his chest, nothing would be amiss.

Raph said on March 24th, 2008 at 6:42 pm:

It’s actually quite trivial to change colors on it The main intent was to make things cleaner and less cluttered. It will get even less cluttered once I take a chainsaw to the sidebars.

Wolfgang Wozniak said on March 24th, 2008 at 6:42 pm:

Truth