Duskrider's Blog

I was working in my website control panel today, going through fantastico looking for a script to do comments... something like a blog only not as huge, and I noticed that my blog software is out of date. I use b2evoloution for this blog, and that's what showed up on the little update panel. The version numbers were pretty far off, which is to be expected since I haven't updated this blog since I installed it (about a year and a half ago). Normally I wouldn't update something that seems to be working ok, but I've been having tons of spam problems and the old version didn't have a few of the options I really wanted in a blog. Anyway, I figured I'd try the update and see what happens.

So I click the little update button and BANG ZOOM! The blog is updated correctly, everything works and I can go about my day.

Riiiight.

Anyway, I click the little update button and it shows me the results... everything is updated and it should be good to go. I come back to check on my blog and all the colors have changed and the layout is different. I had forgotten that I customized my layout to match the look of my website. Oh well, no big problem, I'll just upload the old version of my template page and it should take care of it.

Riiiight.

So I uploaded my old version and lo and behold it didn't work. In fact, it didn't work so spectacularly that I got a whole plethora of error messages. Luckily b2evo was smart enough to make a backup copy of all my old pages just before the problem happend. I also have a local copy on my machine at home, but it probably hasn't been updated in a year or more because I haven't made any changes to the site. So I get into the backup directory, unzip the backup files, replace the files on the server and everything is hunky dory!

Riiiight.

The new version of b2evo was so different than my old version that it totally changed the database structure too... so simply uploading old versions of the pages wasn't going to work. OK, no problem. B2evo also made a backup copy of my database before it did it's little hoodoo magic on my blog, so I have that to work from. Just load the backup file and overwrite the new version so it matches my old blog... which is currently back on the site.

Done.

Ok, so we're right back where we started and now I can retry the update to get my new version of b2evo from scratch and do the styling right this time. I go into the control panel, check the fantastico page and b2evo is flashing update again. Good. So I click update. Everything works this time, I go update my stylesheets, the blog looks good, and I can go about my day.

Riiiight.

Uh oh... what's this? That table already exists? This procedure cannot complete? Please refer to the help documents!? Now what? Well, it turns out that overwriting the tables with old data wasn't enough. See, the new version of b2evo actually added tables to the database, and the backup script didn't have that information. Running the backup script rolled the tables back to the previous version, but the NEW tables created by the update script still existed. When the update tried to run the second time, it threw an error because it didn't expect those tables to be there. That error, in turn, broke the update... which broke my blog. Again.

Ok, so now what? Well, roll back the site pages again just like before. Done. Ok, no go and wipe the database clean... drop all the tables and start from scratch. What? There's no command to do that? Drop * from database doesn't work? Ok, so we do it all manually. Done. Now reload the database from the backup. Done. Back to square one... Again. Now go back into fantastico and click update. Done. Check out the blog... ugly. Upload the stylesheets ONLY this time. Done. Check out the blog... better. Still a few problems... oh yeah, don't forget to add the header and footer, plus the extra stuff over on the side there that I can't talk about because it's against someone's TOS. (Some of you might get that) Ok... good. Change back a few colors that were changed around for no good reason. Done. Check out blog... perfect.

And now ladies and gentlemen I give you a blog that looks exactly like it did before!

To be fair, it does have a fair bit more options and protection than the old version. I'm actually going to allow comments to the blog entries now... on a testing basis. If I get too much spam I'll shut comments down in a hurry, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Oh, and if you get a 503 Temporarily Unavailable page that's just CrawlSnare misbehaving. I haven't got all the bugs out of him yet, but once I do I think he'll be one of the best anti-crawler scripts on the 'net.