The last thing anyone wants in the middle of a blog redesign is a WordPress update. Whatever you do, do not ever, ever, ever update WordPress and redesign your blog in real time in front of everyone. I guarantee this: you will look as stupid as I did.
After 14 hours of blog blankness and database wankery, I’m back. However, I did manage to stay up till 5AM trying to restore things, only to have to abandon the effort and leave the front door wide open with nobody home and no furniture, food or connection in the house.
Here’s the problem: I don’t speak SQL. I have never spoken SQL. I’m just a geek with a stubborn need to control stuff, but I claim no formal training or other magical abilities to understand things. I intuit. It is an ADHD quality and one I treasure. Intuition is good. Common sense is good. So to me, when one exports a database, they are simply exporting data. Similarly, when one imports a database backup, they are simply importing data.
Not so. When one exports a SQL database, there are options to include commands like “Replace”, “Insert”, etc. If you do not use these commands wisely, you will see all efforts to restore a database end in large red letters and an error message beginning on line 1 after you have waited for what seems like forever for the import to begin. Trust me on this.
But, I’m back, having ignored my intuitive self and put on my “this makes no sense but I’ll do it anyway” frame of mind. And I’m back with the skeleton of a design that actually seems to work. It has no pretty things yet, like color, style and glitzy little icons. But it will. And they’ll appear in real time, because that’s how this is happening. No cautious things like working on a sandbox server. That’s not my style. I’ll just hang all my mistakes out here for everyone to see, and hopefully maybe we’ll all learn something in the process.
Dang, what a week.
