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!