No, this is not the new look!

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 3:46 am

Yeesh! The upgrade to the new software went horribly awry - the new site looked great for about two minutes and then the database spun out of control. So I, finally, went back to the old software and database until I can get some sleep and figure out why the system that worked perfectly on a test site blew up when I moved all the files over.

So hooray for database backups. And boo for whatever it was that caused me to back up and then delete the templates that went with the old system, forcing me to go grab the, um, template for those templates. In the meantime, my apologies for whatever doesn't work. Guess what I'll be doing with a couple of large cups of coffee later today?

Comments

been there.. you have my sympathies

By Miles Fidelman (not verified) - 11/23/09 - 7:07 am

A few months back, I had a disk drive die on the server I use for hosting email lists - and in the process discovered some of the ways in which RAIDed drives don't help, especially when they're all nearing end-of-life. Short story: 8 new drives, rebuilding the systems from scratch (luckily I didn't lose any user data - just all the underlying system software), and a 2-week outage. Sigh....

Shudder

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 8:26 am

That would have driven me completely insane, yikes. This is why I try to leave IT issues to the professionals :-).

GhostHUB

By Anonymous - 11/23/09 - 7:22 am

GhostHUB. Don't worry Adam, they landed Apollo 13 and this too will come to pass.

You know, if running this

By anon (not verified) - 11/23/09 - 7:44 am

You know, if running this site was your job, and you broke it all and just left it, you'd be fired.

Again.

It's a website, not brain surgery. Drupal is very simple and easy to use. Then again, some of us have been doing web work for a decade before every douchebag had a blog or a twattah account.

Try running update.php a few times, and properly setting the theme. Did you clear the performance cache? Did you use some nerd's sloppy beta version of a module because it had some web 2.0 lightbox crap or something?

Enjoy your hobby.

I guess the advice is worth what you pay for it

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 7:54 am

You're right. How do you fire yourself.

In any case, yes, did all that. Well, except for the lightbox crap. Never touch the stuff. I *think* the only difference is a URL-shortening module for a re-tweet thing. At least, the log (I know, me, knowing what a log is? Go figure!) showed a bunch of errors related to that right before things fell apart. So I'll try again.

sandbox

By MadMax - 11/23/09 - 8:53 am

So are you saying you had a sandbox running the release candidate? If so, did it not exhibit any of the same problems?

I suggest you pick several hapless regular posters and ask them to beat up your sandbox before you copy it over to the production server.

Yep, and nope

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 9:11 am

It was happily purring along for two weeks, with nary a problem (aside from a template issue, which I fixed by changing templates) and some folks did drop by to beat up on it. So I'm thinking the issue is either the database dump didn't work right or it's one of the new modules I installed during the upgrade.

So back to the sandbox! I'll let folks know where that is once it's up.

Sometimes even free advice....

By Michael Kerpan - 11/23/09 - 9:56 am

... is still grossly over-priced. ;~}

Good luck!

Vinegar and Water, much?

By SwirlyGrrl - 11/23/09 - 8:19 am

Oh really ... um, far as I know, my husband and his coworkers are still employed despite the site they maintain going down fairly often. Then again, it is probably far more complex than anything you've ever touched.

Too bad you don't seem to have a job to go to, so you can go around saying "blah blah blah PROFESSIONAL blah blah" and pick nits on the DIY spirit. Work on your people skilz, and you might actually get a second interview! Then you'll have all that important webby stuff to do for real and won't need to slag Adam for his perceived lack.

If this were his job he

By ShadyMilkMan - 11/23/09 - 8:38 am

If this were his job he would be able to spend ALL of his time doing it. There would also be a bigger budget to handle issues like this as well. As it is this is a free site run part time by someone who has spent time in the journalism field. He has never claimed to be on par with the New York Times or even the Boston Globe, although when given the choice on where to check for my local news first I come here and obviously you do too.

Twitter me this!

Thank you

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 9:15 am

One minor correction: This actually is my job now and my wife complains I do spend all my time on it :-).

That's one of the reasons I didn't just give up last night (um, this morning) and leave a blank site ...

In that case your fired! It

By ShadyMilkMan - 11/23/09 - 9:25 am

In that case your fired!

It is still a free service and you are your own boss in a small operation. Unless people have a subscription they can just deal with it, especially if their name is simply anon.

Good luck with the debugging (which hopefully includes removing the bug from the logo ;) )

Twitter me this!

!

By riggssm - 11/23/09 - 8:41 am

Is it indigestion, dear?

www.pepto-bismol.com

Damn barista

By Sock_Puppet - 11/23/09 - 10:48 am

Brought his latte with skim instead of soy. Doesn't she know by now he's lactose intolerant? On to trash the place on Yelp.

Right, websites are super

By anon (not verified) - 11/23/09 - 10:04 am

Right, websites are super easy to run perfectly 100% of the time. Computers NEVER throw up errors and glitches and they always do everything you expect them to do.

This fact is now known as the cause of all web developers, designers and server admins losing their jobs and having to work at McDonald's as everyone just develops, designs, and runs their own site nowadays, because issues NEVER happen and everything is drag n drop simple.

Oh...wait...

Lesson of the day

By Adam Pieniazek (not verified) - 11/23/09 - 10:08 am

Always do new site launches on a Friday/Saturday. If you try to launch/relaunch a site on a Monday/Sunday night, stuff will hit the fan.

You would think I know that

By adamg - 11/23/09 - 10:46 am

Since the way we'd always do things at the old job was to shut the site down late Friday so we'd have all weekend to fix all the stuff that broke with an upgrade (and we'd still wind up fixing stuff on Monday).

In any case, I *think* I have an answer: As my anon friend suggested, clear all the caches before moving from the subdirectory to the main directory. At least, that's what worked for other folks moving their site from a working subdirectory to a blowing up root directory. I could've sworn I'd done that, but maybe not. But as he notes, I should be fired. Good thing I'm not in IT :-).

Aha!

By Stevil - 11/23/09 - 11:24 am

The Pieniazek Principle! Is that the same one that says release bad news on Friday because the few people that notice will forget by Monday?