Archive for August 3rd, 2009

I swear it’s good

August 3rd, 2009

As regular readers of this wee column will know, I have been doing a lot of work over the last few days shifting this site around.

This operation has not escaped the attention of Herself.

“Will you please stop cursing,” says she.

“I will in my hole.  Now please fuck off and leave me to my misery,” is my cheerful response.

“You’re swearing an awful lot these days,” says she.

“Am I?  I don’t think I am,” I reply innocently.  “Bollocks!” I roar as another huge file vanishes just as it was nearly downloaded.

“There you go again,” she mutters.

“AW FUCK!” I reply as a newly transferred site shows up as a blank screen instead of what I was expecting.

“Will you please stop.  You’re frightening the guinea pig, and I have just had a complaint from the neighbours.”

“Fuck the guinea pig and the neighbours.  I have my own fucking problems.”

“It’s not doing any good.”

“Oh yes it is” I reply with a smile.  “Take a look at this.”

I sit back and relax for a minute as she reads.  Another site has been transferred successfully.

“Fucking great,” I smile to myself.

Well, here I am

August 3rd, 2009

Well it looks like the dust is beginning to settle.

I started at eight, yesterday morning.

“No bother,” says I.  “I have all day to copy a couple of sites.  How hard can that be?”

I had not allowed for the extremely weird control panel I had been presented with, for a start.  Whoever designed that did so with a logic that defies gravity.  Nothing is where you would expect it to be.  There is a myriad of menus that all lead around in circles and they all look the same but aren’t.  Have you ever been in Hampton Court Maze?  That’s what it was like.

After an hour or two, I managed to set up a blank area to take this site.  Great!  Now my problem was how to copy the old site across.  You see, you can’t just copy the old site onto a PC and then copy them up to the new one – it just doesn’t work.  The new site will just start looking for bits on the old server or something and will start crying. I hate that.

I had to create a new site from scratch and then just copy the relevant bits across.  But what are the relevant bits?

Then there is the database.  Fuck me, but it’s big.  And when the new site has a file limit of 5 Megathingies, it is too big.  So I had to chop the database into little chunks and copy them all across in little bits, and I had to be very careful to keep them in the right order.  Otherwise you would find your comments coming out your ears.

I managed it in the end.

Even then I had complaints from a few people that they could only see things up to last June, but I could see everything so it that a case of tough shit!

I think it’s all working now.  I don’t think I lost anything and I think everything is in the right order.

It actually seems a bit faster now, but that will doubtless change.

I still have a couple of minor details to fix.

And of course I still have a load of other sites to copy.

Bollox.