Sep 262007
 

Sometimes what you need is a fresh start. Sometimes you get one anyway.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 last night and, following a series of mystifying and doubtless comical problems, I … er … lost all my old posts.

Well, not lost, as such. I do have the databases backed up,1 and I do know of an import function that would bring all the old data back into the new install. I have lost all the categories on my old posts, though, backup or no, which is rather more of a pain. Sure and I don't want to be trawling through some whatever-many posts and re-categorising.

Surprisingly, I find myself quite sanguine about all of this. Strange.2

I have found the plugin which was breaking everything and thus caused my dreadful lapse of judgement in resorting to a clean install, so hopefully now all will be well. Although this does mean all comments will be treated as new, and will need to be manually approved before they appear; bear with me on that one. Also, anyone who bothered to register with the blog, that information is lost, sorry. You'll need to create a new login (although you don't need to be registered to comment).

So, here we are. Fresh install. First priority is to get the static pages up, and I'll maybe start importing old posts over the next few days. I'm also thinking, to celebrate my new state of zen, of designing a new look for the site.

We'll see how we go. In the meantime, welcome back. It's certainly sparser cleaner now!

  1. because I am a diligent little fly []
  2. I can assure you I wasn't feeling quite so sanguine about six hours ago. It's amazing what sleep will fix. []
 Posted by at 8:01 am
Jun 222007
 

I found a new poll plugin last night, and this one means I can have ticky boxes in my polls. Unfortunately, it does not display the poll in the feeds: it just has a bland little text message directing readers back to the site. Which is better than a blank nothing, but it's still not ideal.

The last poll plugin did display in the feeds — but no ticky boxes :(

So, since I know a lot of you read this site via LJ feeds, I thought: a poll! What's more important? Being able to have ticky boxes in the poll? Or having the poll displayed in the feed?

[poll=2]

(The irony of a ticky-less poll in this circumstance is not lost on me :| )

 Posted by at 8:31 am  Tagged with:
Jun 192007
 

Or at least, I have the phone line and the power and the wireless network up and running.

The net itself is a little sketchier.

And, here's the fun news: the stormwater drains are filling again. More heavy rains and storm-force winds are on the way. One local radio station has even claimed gale-force winds. (nooo! they be stealin mah intarwebs!)

Bear with me, peoples, the blog will be up and running once this stupid weather pattern stops being abusive.

In the meantime, have a lolcat:

via I Can Has Cheezburger, naturally.

Jun 112007
 

staring at the floor for hours on end…

Hello! A quick update from work, where they have power and therefore the interwebs.

For those of you in and out of Aus worrying about my fate, all is well. There's a tree down on the pool (thankfully it only clipped the house on the way down; damage yet to be assessed but we're not open to the elements at least), but otherwise the storm has passed and now it's just a matter of cleaning up. We may not have power until the end of the week, and of course our phone line is still down. But at least the trees blocking the road either side of us have been removed, and I can get out of the house now.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, it all started on Friday morning, when gale-force winds and mammoth seas drove an empty coal tanker onto the beach. Seriously, it's only 100m offshore.

There were fears for three other ships at the time, struggling less than a kilometre offshore, engines at full-power yet unable to make any headway.

The storm on Friday night caused flash flooding in the CBD, among other areas.

My brother, caught in the flood, had to abandon his car in waist-deep water and walk wade home. It also uprooted trees and downed power lines over the entire region.

Definitely one of the worst weekends I've ever had to live through — especially when news forecasts predicted Saturday night's returning storm would in fact be worse than Friday night's. Worse than lifesavers ferrying people along the main street on jetskis? Worse than a tree on the house? Let's just say I had the cats' carrycases ready and the car packed.

Luckily the wind was from a different direction, and mostly passed us by, this time without any further damage. It's not over for people up the valley, however: all that rain means major flooding in the riverine system, with thousands of homes evacuated and the river still to reach its peak in some places.

I'll update again when we have power (and hot showers!) back. In the meantime, if I've missed anything important, leave me a comment here — there's no way I'm trawling through a missed weekend's worth of blog posts, for all y'all are a chatty lot.

See you on the other side!

May 232007
 

Apologies to those reading the blog via newsfeeds. I upgraded wordpress today (after much swearing and angsting over a couple of plugins which refused to play nice), and one of the results was a republishing of all my old posts as new.

If you notice any other fun quirks, let me know :|

 Posted by at 7:11 pm
Jul 312006
 

In the past few days, the baby has been blessed, I've fallen behind in my daily writing, I've watched the Sarah-Jane/K9 episode of the latest Doctor Who series twice, attempted to clean up my to-do list (which is now ridiculously overlong and unmanageable; and the attempt to clean it up only ate up time, really), downloaded and installed Thunderbird and (for the second time) decided I don't want to use it. (This has little to do with Thunderbird itself, which I quite like, and more to do with the web interface of my email being just too damn cool.) I've also updgraded my site to the latest version of WordPress, tweaked the website display (only after I'd finished writing for the day), and am, as I write this, uploading my writing files to an online backup service. Needless to say, I'm feeling very virtuous right about now. Although that will vanish if the upload plays tricksies on me, for then I will feel cranky.

I'm sure there were other things, but I'm too lazy to dredge them from my increasingly non-existent memory.

 Posted by at 12:14 pm