Monthly Archives: January 2008

Oh.

I found something Officially Not Good about the WordPress upgrade:

My pages are gone.

Pages are, well, the other pages of the blog, such as the wish list, my icon credits page, and my Currently page that recorded what I’m reading and doing on it.

It’s not earth-shattering — it’s not like I’ve lost years of actual journaling — it’s just a pain in the neck, as now I have to reconstruct them. Not overly high on the list of priorities when I’m still trying to figure out how to get the upgrade to work the way it’s supposed to work. Fortunately, I think I have an original copy of the icon credits page that I built in HTML that will save a few hours of work, although updating it will take a lot of time too as I try to figure out what’s missing and what’s been phased out.

I may be able to find them manually by poking around on my server, but they’re not showing up on the sidebar and the admin panel can’t find them either, so I am assuming they are lost. If they show up somewhere on their own I will be delighted, but until then, I’m writing them off.

ETA: Aha! Found them masquerading as regular posts. Added them to the links bars by creating a new Owls’ Court category. Messing around with the theme again too, hoping it will fix things… but so far, the category error is still appearing up there. Digging through the support forums is a lengthy process and is still hurting my brain, as it has been doing since the day of the upgrade.

Five Things

1. My new corner desk, second-hand from Craigslist! It fits in beautifully. My other desk now serves for research and writing longhand, stretching out to my right. The room looks lovely and big. My monitor is now more than fourteen inches away from my eyes. I am very, very happy. I have stacks and stacks of books to relocate, because we took out the tower bookcase that was to the left of my desk, but half of its contents are already neatly ranged on shelves in my closet.

2. HRH, who not only went to get the desk but put it together and helped me rearrange things in the office. He even sat patiently with me as I thought about which wires to fish through where under the desks, and disconnected and reconnected the subwoofer three times for me.

3. The phone call that came about two hours ago, telling HRH that he had a full-time permanent job as the Creative Arts Tech at the college. (Yes, yes! We are over the moon!)

4. Going to the blood clinic all by myself this morning, not stressing for the hour I waited (read a third of eBear’s Dust, though, which certainly contributed to the all-round positive experience), and not passing out when they took six of the large vials of blood. In fact, I didn’t even feel dizzy afterwards. The technician was wonderful; I barely felt the needle slip into the vein.

5. The warm fog that has been around all day. I wore my polar fleece jacket out this morning, and drove home from the hospital with my window rolled down and Handel’s Water Music on at a decently high volume. We had windows open in the house today, too.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Maggie just sat on my mouse and moved, managing to highlight and cut a huge chunk of the manuscript.

Then she knocked over a glass of water when I frantically tried to get her off.

Am currently running damage control, trying to figure out exactly how much got cut by looking at the last saved version of the document. If only it were as easy as clicking the button combo to paste.

ETA: Fixed, salvaged, all good. That was a very bad moment, there.

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 13,439
New words today: 1,041

Wow. I am so out of practice. This was like pulling teeth.

Off to get the boy.

Not Dead…

… just tired. And busy. And disenchanted with the whole journaling thing because of the upgrade issue.

Bah.

The boy went to a birthday party today and we all had a wonderful time. What is it that makes toddlers and preschoolers behave like pack animals when three or more of them gather? Giggling, stampeding pack animals? And this was before the cake.

Oh Well

Went back to my old installation of WP… and sure enough, my updated mySQL tables caused an error. As in, all my categories disappeared. So I restored the upgrade.

Apart for the autosave hiccough, the only other drawback to this version that I can find at the moment is that the LJ feed of this journal has gone wonky. It’s choking on the error up there at the top of the page. So we’re sticking to this version for the moment, until someone with more knowhow than I’ve got helps me fix it because now I’ve done all I can. Eventually the LJ folk will figure out I’ve gone remarkably silent and come see what’s up. Other aggregators using the RSS feed, like Bloglines and other newsreaders, are unaffected so far as I can tell.

It was worth a try. I’m going to go have a warm bath to try to soak some of the aches away, and then go to bed.

More Upgrade Argh…

There are more upgrade issues going on. WordPress ‘published’ the last entry, but it didn’t show up anywhere — not on the journal itself, not in any of the categories, not in the list of posts in 2008. I clicked my Back button until I found the text, copied and pasted it in a text file, made a couple of test posts till one worked, then pasted the original entry over it. That’s not a theme issue; that’s something different.

Very tempting to roll back my upgrade to the *mumbleveryoldmumble* version I was using. It will take just as much time as doing the install did yesterday (read: six hours), but at least it ought to work again (unless the updated mySQL database form won’t function with the old version… which is entirely possible, ARGH). This sort of thing is why I put it off for so long.

Gnarr.

(And it just did it AGAIN! It’s the autosave function — once it autosaves, when I hit the publish button it assumes I’m trying to edit it and asks me if I want to. The post vanishes whether I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For now, the solution is to compose a blog-post in a word processor, then copy/paste it.)

ETA: Changing to an original compatible theme doesn’t fix it. After scouring the help forum, it sounds like there’s a file left over from the original installation that’s no longer used in the new version, and it’s gumming up the works. Problem is… I have no idea what it is or where it may be. And I cringe at the thought of removing the entire installation (both of them!) and reinstalling from scratch, because that sounds like it’s begging for another losing-everything-disaster. Although it may fix the double-installation problem.

I think I may have hit the limit of my know-how. I really, really don’t need this frustration at the moment.

New Year, New Health Issues To Address…

I tried to make an appointment with my doctor today while we were there for the sequel to Liam’s check-up (he’s 34 lbs and 93 cm tall, although that latter measurement is very iffy as he insisted on leaning against the wall with his heels three inches away from it). The nurse said, “She’s just had a cancellation; would you like to see her right now?” So HRH played with Liam in the waiting room while I went back in and recited the list of things HRH and I had talked through last night that had been plaguing me for a couple of months: general fatigue, joint pain, muscle stiffness and pain, weakness in the arms, headaches, loss of appetite, chills, poor sleep, waking unrested, lack of concentration… I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t all connected, and connected in a bad way. I figured it was a sleep thing that was negatively impacting everything else, and the aches were a result of the damp and cold weather we’re having.

Is it all connected? Well, most likely. Without missing a beat she asked me a couple of other questions (who knew my increased sensitivity to wool, angora, and silver might have something to do with it?), then made a tentative diagnosis of fibromyalgia, with a possibility of it being rheumatoid arthritis. The blood tests I’m doing next Tuesday will confirm one way or the other, and indicate the necessary treatment.

Better to know and do something about it so I can get back to living properly instead of wincing a lot and being unable to pick Sparky up.