Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

While I wasn’t looking, WordPress somehow decategorized most, but not all, of the over 700 posts on this site. However it did this mostly to older posts so I didn’t notice at first. However the result of this is that most of the URLs have now changed, and many things that shouldn’t be in the birding category now seem to be; for instance, this post about Mac OS X Leopard. In addition the category pages such as Sci Fi now are virtually empty.

I can see no alternative but to go through and manually recategorize all 730 posts on this site as time permits. If I do 10 a day I’ll be finished in three months. Bleah.

I am increasingly unpleased with WordPress. I’m going to stop recommending it to others, and will seriously consider any alternatives that come along.

For a change this is about software bugs, not insects. :-) Ever have a reverse mystery bug? This is not one that’s hard to find or understand, but one that’s brutally easy to understand and fix. The mystery is how the code ever worked in the first place. I had one of those this morning.

The AppleScript I use to manage the quotes of the day on Cafe con Leche stopped working mysteriously. Running the script with the result log open made the problem obvious: it couldn’t find the file index.html in my cafeconleche directory. Well, that’s an easy fix. The file isn’t named index.html and hasn’t been for many moons. It’s named index.phtml (because it uses PHP to include some files). I changed the name of the file the script was trying to open to index.phtml, and all was well.

But here’s what I don’t understand: why didn’t this break yesterday? and the day before that? and the day before that? It was working just fine until this morning. was there a symlink from the old index.html name, and if so why did it vanish? Was my script updated previously, and somehow got replaced by an older version? And if so, how and why?
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I couldn’t figure out how to fix the comments problem introduced by the recent upgrade so I restored the database from backup, and ran the upgrade one more time. There were still a number of error messages:
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OK, I think I’ve at least partially deborked the upgrade. There are still some problems with comments needing moderation. Holler if you notice any remaining problems. I still can’t figure out how to assign a category to a new post. I’m not sure if that’s remaining borkage or the new blog interface. (OK, got it: it’s the interface.)

The proximate cause was that the WordPress scripts did not have permission to create and drop tables. The underlying cause was a combination of classic programmer errors:
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I’ve upgraded WordPress on this site to version 2.5.1. For the first time, things did not go perfectly smoothly so please holler if you notice any problems.
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This is what happens when computer book titles are too sexy:

And here I thought they were recommending this because of all the gay porn I’d been buying. :-)