Well, it looks like I’ve managed to mess up an upgrade of the ‘ol blogging software.
For quite a bit, I’ve been running the older, unpatched 2.1 version of WordPress here. Late last week, I discovered that this was something of a grave error – the main page header template was chock full of spam links and kruft, all hidden from view by a stupid little CSS trick.
Fortunately, the brand spanking new Version 2.6 of WordPress was fresh out of the software factory, so I read through the four step upgrade, did a little bit of FTP magic, and ta-dah! New, more hack-resistant blog. I even upgraded My Wife’s blog.
Then, when I was getting ready to post Friday’s comic, I noticed that the categories for my posts were all… blank. No text at all. And that the same thing had happened to the Booniverse.
I’m just glad I didn’t upgrade the JSFR… That would have been a nightmare.
Anyway, it turns out that it’s a known bug with a messy solution. A solution that I haven’t implemented for the Booniverse yet, but which looks to be cleaner than the solution I tried on my own…
Basically, having made a working backup of all of my old posts before this whole mess started, I simply cleared out the blog database and re-imported everything from the backup.
And tah-dah! All the categories are back.
And… all of the posts have been renumbered. So anyone who has linked to an individual post just had their link hosed. And the various search engine spiders are gonna eat half my bandwidth when they look at the site and decide that everything old is new again. So. Not the optimal solution.
We’ll see if I can avoid that with the Booniverse and the JSFR.