The More Things Change…

A couple of months back, I updated the design of sknoblog to what you see now.

Then a few weeks back, my site was suspended by my ISP when a major spam attack caused my comments database table to grow too big, too fast. The table was simply destroyed by the ISP.

Part of the problem is that I started sknoblog a long time ago, and that I was still running WordPress 1.5.

WordPress 2.x has much better, ISP-friendly, spam prevention, via Akismet.

Furthermore, in WP 2.x, the visible part of the site, i.e. the design (or Theme), has a radically different architecture.

My new design used the old 1.5 architecture (1 .php file and 1 .css file!). While it probably would have mostly worked under 2.3, I thought if I were going to update WP, I should update my theme to the new architecture.

So the first thing I did was search for a theme that had the same overall structure as my existing design, and that was well coded (i.e. whose code I could decipher). I decided to use Silhouette, by Brian Gardner, whom I thank.

Using another test account with a version of WP 2.something installed, I then proceded to restyle/recode the entire Theme, in order to reproduce my WP 1.5 sknoblog design.

I then updated my WordPress to the latest version (2.3.3 as of this writing), updated the database, got a couple of nasty error messages, and discovered that all my categories had vanished, and that all my posts were therefore uncategorized.

A search on the WP forums showed I wasn’t alone. So if this happened to you, check out this thread, which points to this trick that makes it possible to run the upgrade routine again, which fixed the problem for me.

So now I’m fixing and adjusting things here and there, but I’m more or less where I wanted to be: I’ve updated sknoblog to the 2.x WordPress platform, which will allow me to do some things that I couldn’t do before.

Until then, here it is: The all new sknoblog, hopefully mostly indistinguishable from the old sknoblog!