Bloggasm

Updated below

So I’ve been meaning to upgrade my WordPress account for a good week now. I haven’t upgraded since I started this site two years ago and so last night I sat down to do so. I thought it would be as simple as clicking on a few buttons and following some prompts. I was dead wrong. In fact I’m shocked how difficult it actually is to do a simple upgrade for WordPress.

I first started with an “automatic update” plugin I was able to find. After plenty of tinkering around I was finally able to upload and activate it. But after following the prompts it gave it was unable to get past the third or fourth step without hitting an error. After fiddling with it for a few minutes I gave up.

Then came the manual upgrade. This is where things got ugly. After making sure I had multiple backups for my site, I went about following the detailed instructions for installing the new version of wordpress. But the instructions turned out to be not detailed enough. After deleting all the files it told me to, I began the upload process and this is where the instructions suddenly got murky.

Long story short, my website was then non-functional. I had backup files but didn’t even know how to reverse the damage.

In stepped my friend Stephen Ward. I sent a panicked email to him and he responded immediately, going into my server to undo the damage I had done. Between 9 and 11 p.m. he worked tirelessly. Shortly before midnight my site was once again working and, more importantly, all my content was restored.

Perhaps I should have followed the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. After all, I wasn’t having any problems managing my content with the old wordpress. The only reason I wanted to upgrade was so if I wanted to download and activate some of the newer plugins I could.

I’m now back at square one with the old wordpress. I think I might go with it for a little longer. And when I do finally decide to take the plunge, I’m going to make sure someone who knows what he’s doing is helping.

UPDATE: Uh oh, it looks like all my content didn’t make it through the storm. It looks like my comments have been wiped. Damn. Oh well, it could have been worse. Not sure how this will affect my SEO in the coming weeks. Hopefully not much.