Don’t you hate that incredible adrenaline surge you get when you think that you have really stuffed something up bigtime. The thought that maybe this is too stuffed and I really don’t know anyone to fix it up.

Today’s adrenaline I would like to blame on Wordpress Version 2.0 but really it was just all my fault. Wordpress is the program that controls and runs my blog and has just released a brand spanking new version with many improvements over the previous version and being one that has the constant need to have the best, naturally I just had to have it for my blog.

Now here is where things really began to go wrong. I upgraded the files and started getting various errors about bad things happening. Not being able to resolve various things and the blog itself to read was just a mass of errors until a fatal error occured in the sidebar that stopped the blog dead in its tracks. Its at this point that I realised in my haste to have the new and improved toy that I had forgotten to do something very important, make a backup. Backing up is important for many reasons not only including saving your data and meaning you don’t have to cut/paste hundreds of entries back into your blog when you really stuff up. See its important stuff.

Its at this point that i would like to stress that I didn’t panic. I was however looking at things very seriously, to the point in fact that I even turned off the cricket. I looked on the support forums incase someone else had experienced my level of stupidity, they hadn’t and then added a temporary index to the site so that people visiting would just get a message saying there were problems and that it would be back soon (ha if only they knew). I tried various things including reloading the wordpress script and glaring at the computer. Basically exactly what didn’t fix the site. Then i left the house and went for a drive.

Getting home later I looked and confirmed. Yep the site is still not working properly. Damn the wordpress fairies had not hacked into my site in the time i was gone and fixed my stupidity, but on the brightside neither had they hacked in to tell me that i was stupid. In such circumstances one must take the brightside when ever it is available i guess! Then I realised that in my haste and the subsequent drama, there was something else that i had forgotten to do before upgrading.

Plugins. Plugins are great things and have many uses. They can be used from combating spam to counting the number of words in a blog to just about anything in fact. My blog until today used 14 plugins to get things done. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatable when there are upgrades and produce errors when compared to the errors i was getting are remarkably identical to the primary error that i was getting trying to use my blog, almost as if that was the cause of all my problems. Disabling all the plugins coincidentally fixed all the problems and i have at this stage added almost all of them back with the blog staying alive and kicking. Only Live+Press appears to producing errors.

So the moral of the whole story is this. I’m stupid. No wait, there is more, backup and follow the instructions, your very life blog may depend on it.

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