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.

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.