I am doing an upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, don’t be surprised to see the blog broken for a bit.

Later:

OK, I think it’s done, and there seem to be no adverse effects. During the few minutes that it was defenseless, 7 spams came in.

And my Visual Editor conked out beforehand — the dreaded “visual editor just doesn’t work” bug that apparently plagues many. Sigh. Here’s what fixed it:

• The upgrade, at least on my machine, put everything up with the wrong permissions. I set the wp_includes folder and all files under to 755.
• I also deleted the contents of wp-content/uploads/js_cache

Apparently there are several things that cause this. So here’s some useful threads.

Oh, and you need to add captions to your existing theme if you want them styled right on the images. I found this, though I then started tweaking it.

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Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.

Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.

So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all.

Sick, Food poisoning, I think.

Many things to post about, such as Whirled, Vivaty, Congressional hearings, a cool art game, and more. When I get the chance…

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!

…aka, the blogging dilemma…

What with all the new sites that track various sorts of virtual worlds news, it’s getting harder to figure out what to blog about. What’s more, I don’t even really know what the readership of the site is anymore (other than “largish.”) Is it people interested in UO/SWG style worldy games? Theory of Fun/Game Grammar scholarly types? Is it people following Metaplace? How many are general web folks looking for the intersection of games and social software?

I know, “write what you want.” But to some degree, I admit I am audience driven. I also don’t want to just end up regurgitating old posts, or reblogging news from other sites. Because of this, I have been posting a little less. Of course, I am also doing a lot of work around the Metaplace alpha, so some of the reason for the decrease in posting is that my energy is just going elsewhere…

Anyway, just wanted to take the pulse.

Apologies for the downtime yesterday — my host decided to move me from one machine to another, more powerful machine. But they literally gave me no notice. I got the email telling me about it after the site was already unavailable to me! As a result I wasn’t able to warn anyone or put up any redirectors or anything.

Service seems to be back to normal, so we’ll see.

Twitter / kpbsnews

This was invaluable, as was this.

And everything looks fine. The filter from the air conditioner was truly horrendous, nearly solid charcoal colored. Here’s some pics from the way back. Click on any of them to get larger versions…

This is what the smoke is looking like over the southern LA area. It was like this in Anaheim (where even the mighty big hotel AC systems couldn’t combat the smell of smoke), and pretty much all the way down to San Juan Capistrano.

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Woke up this morning to the news that the I5 was closed because of fires in Camp Pendleton, so we couldn’t go back even if we wanted to. But that seems to be under control now, and the highway is open again.

There are some reports here and there that neighborhoods right by us are open — ones that were closer to the fire even — but when I called the county’s hotline, they said that our zip code was still marked as restricted, so we are staying put for now. In a half hour, we’ll miss checkout time for the hotel, and at that point, we may as well stay the night.

I am thinking we may also go shopping for stuff likely to be hard to find down there, like dust masks, HEPA filters, and the like.

Good maps:

• Chris Kelley’s

This one shows that Mira Mesa is now an area of concern, as is Santee and Lakeside. It shows our area in the middle, as “previously burned,” but as you can see it’s kinda surrounded by areas of concern. Notable is that 67 just closed, and that Bonita and Chula Vista seem to be OK now. But really, it all depends on the winds.

• KPBS

They are keeping it updated with the latest set of incident reports, etc.

• Homes lost in Rancho Bernardo

The councilman walked the area with his staff and noted addresses. he only covered one part of the neighborhood,though. Then someone else made a Google Map of it. Hurray for the Internet!

• Recent hotspots