Upgrading Fun
I just finished upgrading the main sites. Boy was that fun. I had been working on updating the Anime Pulse wordpress theme for WP 2.1. I was almost done when they released a new version, so I had to redo a bunch of work. Normally updating themes is simple, but since I’m doing funky stuff with the feed and the sidebar with the javascript boxes and the targeting of the iframe, it means I have to write my own versions of wordpress functions. The functions changed quite a bit between versions 2.0 and 2.1, so I had a lot of work to do. Then I did the upgrade, and nothing worked. I bounced back and forth between the default theme and our theme as I tried to fix things, and got the sidebar working, but not the frame. So I gave up and went to bed, leaving it on the default theme.
That would have been fine except for one thing. I forgot to make sure that the feed still worked. Well, guess what? It didn’t. I got up at 6:30 and saw Deathgod’s post on the forums saying that the feed wasn’t validating and I checked it out. Turns out there was no feed, which would explain a lack of validation 
. So I spent an hour rewriting the feed file to work correctly and managed to get that done before I went to work. Then on my way back from Japanese I had a light-bulb. I’m not talking some dinky 100 watt bulb here, I’m talking Sports Arena, Alien Ship floodlight. The main page loop had changed from a “foreach” loop to a “while” loop. But in my tiredness last night I had only changed the loop delaration, but I forgot to change the “endfor” to an “endwhile”. I got back to work and made that quick change and viola, we had a site again. I did a quick upgrade of podpress, and some tweaking and we were back in business. It was much faster upgrading this site, as the theme was done, I just had to tweak it for my site. It makes me wish I was more diligent in setting up a test environment to verify upgrades before rolling it out live. I know that if AP gets bigger then I will have to do that to avoid downtime, but at least this time I had the default theme to fall back on, otherwise I would have had to roll back the upgrade which is always a good time.
Anyways, I thought I’d better check back in as it’d been a while since my last post. I’m working on an advertising deal through Kiptronic that should come through in the next couple months. Nothing huge, but it could be lucrative for us. A host’s work is never done. 