That poor monkey must be knackered!
Ahem, yes, well anyway… here we are again. I must confess, I didn’t expect the “maintenance” to take six months, and to be perfectly honest what has taken place wouldn’t really be accurately summed up as maintenance anyway.
It all started when Aaron, the kind lad who has been hosting my blog – on a machine that’s shifted around from his bedroom, to commercial hosting facility, and back – since I stopped working at I.T.&e. decided that it was time for a bit of an upgrade. We’d discussed it a few times, and I guess at the back of my mind it was one of those projects that’ll happen in the not too distant future – meaning never. Imagine my surprise when my blog stopped working on January 2nd, and I was in the Swiss Alps where there was nothing I could do about it! The much fabled upgrade had taken place. Ordinarily all that would have been required was to configure a Postgres database on the new linux build, and resume service as normal. Aaron, however, couldn’t work out how to do it. I condescendingly logged in to perform the task, before realising that I had no idea what to do either!
What followed was a series of developmental stumbles: I decided to redevelop for MySQL, which took a while. After having a test copy of my blog set up on my PC, the hard drive seized so I had to start again. I wrestled with a copy in Windows using a WAMP stack, but that never seemed to work properly either. Eventually I got the SQL side fixed, and then stumbled on the CSS side of it (might as well give the thing a facelift, right?). After rewriting 2/3 of it to use a HTML generating class rather than the fairly crude hand-carved output it had previously, I realised that I’d painted myself into a corner and the whole thing would need to be re-done anyway.
About a month ago I decided that this was getting silly, and if I hadn’t fixed it in 5 months then chances are I wasn’t going to, so I resigned myself to surging forward into 2005 and having a bash at using WordPress. In a sense I feel a little pang of defeat at using one of the web’s largest blogging packages rather than my little hand-tooled bundle of joy. Realistically though, the whole thing was just barely held together with masking tape and rubber bands, whereas this is hopefully more robust & fully featured.
So, welcome back!
The next couple of months will be interesting, as not only do I have loads to blog about coming up, but I suppose I should also at least make mention of what I’ve been up to in the last 6.
By way of demonstration, this week so far I’ve been to see Daniel Kitson in Regent’s Park (a show which I shall attempt to post about in due course), been to Shakespeare’s Globe to see the comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, morris danced at the finest pubs in the Belgravia Estate – some of the nicest & poshest streets of London, and attended a Radio 3 recording of Rachmaninov’s “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” – an amazing a capella choral work in Russian, sung by the BBC Singers, where I suspect I may have drifted off to sleep and desperately hope I didn’t snore too much.
And thus, I guess it’s “back to your regularly scheduled service!”.
