Regular readers may notice that I didn’t post yesterday. In fact, yesterday was the first day since starting this site that I didn’t post. This wasn’t because I intentionally forgot. Quite the opposite. I upgraded to WordPress 3.0, ran into some problems, and was up past midnight trying to fix the scary Fatal Error messages that Google had no help for. Thankfully WordPress still recognized my current install, and nothing was lost.
How’d that happen, you ask? First, I forgot to disable my plugins when upgrading from 2.9.1 to 2.9.2. You’re supposed to do that, but in my excitement to upgrade I forgot to do it. I received a few errors, but my install still worked, so I brushed it off. This left me in limbo between two versions.
I ignored this until upgrading until 3.0. This time I disabled my plugins and backed up my data before upgrading. Then the unthinkable happened. Error. Installation failed. Fine, I’ll do it manually, I thought. I downloaded the folder to my computer and uploaded it to Filezilla. This is where I made my next mistake. A lot of the files are the same (obviously), but depending on when the file was last edited, the WordPress 3.0 file could be older than the file it was replacing. I told Filezilla to overwrite the file if the file being overwritten was older and sat back.
That was the big mistake. After lots of headdesking and searching, I overwrote everything in my WordPress folder. Thankfully I saved my plugins and themes. Thankfully WordPress still recognized my installation.
The good thing about this fiasco is that I got to correct a big security mistake I made when installing WordPress for the first time: changing the username of the database to a non-administrative one. I didn’t know about the security implications at the time, so when I saw a username sitting in phpMyAdmin waiting for me, I went ahead and used it. This was not a good idea. Luckily no harm came out of it, but there could have been a lot of harm. That’s fixed now.
Now back to blogging.