Stuff Is Mostly Un-Re-De-Fucked, Thanks For Hanging On
Uncle AndrewMy blog was down for most of yesterday, because of a cataclysmic experience with migrating my blog database from the latin-1 character encoding to utf-8. Somewhen during the process, my database got itself completely töhtenhösen. I had to reinstall from the backup I had prudently made just prior to the conversion. Unfortunately, during the restore, all of my categories were stripped from the database, meaning that all of the posts were glommed together in a single category of “Uncategorized”. There was simply nothing to do but sit down and build the categories (Roominations, Rants, Food Fright, etc), then re-enter the category information for each of my 621 posts manually, one by one. I finished about an hour ago.
On the upside, my blog is now fully utf-8 compliant, which should get rid of the occasional weird characters you may have seen whilst trawling these posts—schwas, copyright symbols, black diamonds with question marks in them—in place of the intended verbiage. It should also be a bit leaner, having had the last of the antiquated WordPress 1.x database structure peeled away by the unexpected “upgrade”. (It’s doubtful that this jettisoning of obsolete ballast will actually make my blog run any faster or anything, but it’s always refreshing to give your server the occasional high colonic to purge the impurities.)
On the downside, anyone who may have linked to a category—Irony Supplement, say—rather than an individual post will find that the rebuilt list of categories does not match the old one, so your link will connect to a different category entirely, or perhaps no category at all.
Overall this could have been much, much worse, and it did give me an un-strenuous project to work on while I’m recuperating….well, physically un-strenuous, anyway. 😕
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