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Well, That Figures…

I no more than get the WordPress software update completed, yesterday… I swear… no more than 10 minutes, and the next update comes in, and it’s an urgent one. Some kind of security bug has been discovered on the version I updated to.

So, I’m updating again today. Impact should be fairly minor, since this is a fairly minor update, as I gather it, in terms of the changes involved, but the procedure is still as long from my point of view. You’ll notice that the ‘down for maint’ screen will be up for a short while today.

That bit of pain aside, yesterday was trying for another reason. You’ll notice that the category listings along the right column is looking a little strange in the numbers. That’s because I got crossed up yesterday between tags and categories, and as a result, the categories were all but fully erased.

Now, usually, I’d have thought to go to the backed up database, but there was a conversion process on the database incidental to the upgrade, and I’d not gotten a decent backup yet.  So, I was forced to rebuild, manually, the category listing.  That done, I’m now forced to re-categorize all 9000 or so posts. It seems nobody’s thought in the WordPress community to make software to mass issue category listings.  It’d be a lot easier if I could, for example, search out all posts with “Fred Thompson” in them, and based on that add the attribute of the Fred Thompson category.  I suppose it’s possible to do that in the database itself, but I freely admit to not being a DBA. I’m blegging the WP folks for a plugin. We’ll see, I suppose.

The category listing will It’ll be a little weird, only semi-functional, for a while.

I’ll pass along a progress report when I can.

Update:(Bit)

I’ve managed to get v2.32 up and running without fault. 

You shouldn’t notice any difference. Usual disclaimers apply. I still need to get the categories square, and I’m working on that.  Each update only costs a few minutes of line time, but takes me several hours worth of prep, because of the backups and such.

See, usually, I do site backups nightly, as a background process on Gopher, by PII/166. Gohper’s a little slow, but for what he does he’s OK. (Matter of fact I prefer a slow machine in such roles… it takes less internet bandwidth.)  I’ve got that backup process fairly well automated, these days.  Takes about an hour and a half, but since it’s background, nobody cares. The upgrade process, on the other hand, gets done on my big/fast desktop, Panther, who is a 2.7GHz unit, with 2 gigs RAM on. The whole process, even though it’s scripted, pretty much locks Panther down for 2 hours at least, usually more.  Also gobbles a good 70% of the internet bandwidth at the firewall.

Yecch.