Quick, blip anything!

For my sins, I act as webmaster for the Music Group I belong to. I maintain an up-to-date schedule on our web site, coordinate distribution of emails among members, receive application over the web from new people interested in joining us ... that sort of thing. Not all our members are web-savvy, which is one of the reasons for the demise of our forum (although the crunch reason was when we suffered a severe hit from a nasty hacker, from which it took time and effort to recover. The forum hadn't been used all that much anyway, so I set up a blog instead, using Wordpress. After an initial flurry of interest from some of the members, that too finally quietened down to the extent that I occasionally posted something, either about Group activities or interesting happenings on the classical music scene.

And then I thought today that I'd give the blog a bit of a kickstart by posting a flurry of stuff and changing the look through a new them/template. All well and good, until one template I switched to had the disastrous effect of bringing up nothing but blank screens through the site. I narrowed the problem down to having installed a template version which was incompatible with the Wordpress version which was installed, somehow managed to get things back to the stage where I could once again get into the administration panel, and then upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. Things looked fine for a bit, until I realised I'd lost all info about the blog's categories. Frantic research at WP forums and elsewhere failed to provide a solution, and the only possible way out I could think of was to manually edit the database and provide it with the relevant details from my backup. After hours of work, everything finally returned to normal, the template I'd tried before worked fine, and all was well with the world once again.

All of this took hours and hours and hours, during all of which the sun was shining nicely and I kept on telling myself I'd get out 'later' and do some blipping. But I just couldn't leave the Wordpress problem unresolved, so eventually I nipped outside and took a quick blip of one of the lavender beds in the front garden. Not great, I know, but at least it means I'm free of the indignity of a gap in my Blip journal.

I finally got to bed, musing about the wisdom of using Wordpress at all, and wondering if I should take a look at Movable Type instead. Hmmmm ... another day''s work. Best sleep on it.