Well, THAT Was Interesting…

I attempted to upgrade WordPress, which you may know as “What emptyeye.com essentially runs on”, to the current-as-of-this-writing version, 2.3.1. What did I learn from this process?

1. ALWAYS back up relevant files before attempting upgrades. Luckily, I did this a few days before the upgrade; otherwise, the results could have been even more catastrophic than they were (Which amounted to losing a few posts and their comments [Two of the posts are back, the “100000 miles get!” post wasn’t important enough to me, honestly, to go through the trouble. The comments are sadly gone.] and the “On a Cloudy Monday” page [Which I restored in a slightly different form].)
2. For those of you that stumbled onto this entry with search terms like “WordPress 2.3.1 lost categories” or some such, here’s the important part: Make sure you turn off your plug-ins before you upgrade. This oversight was what led to a world of pain, including database errors and the loss of my categories (The “Posts by Type” section of the sidebar). I ended up having to restore a backup of the database (Which contains pretty much all the site content, hence why I lost some posts from the last few days), then turn off plugins, then finally upgrade. Things seem to be working now, except for a bizarre IE glitch which I’m going to try and fix. In the meantime, Get Firefox, which solves the problem without my having to actually succeed at fixing the broken code (Whether the fault is that of myself or Microsoft is a mystery that will probably never be solved).In addition to that, a couple days ago, Lunarpages had to make an emergency data move that involved the server the site was hosted on. This was their issue, not mine, but it resulted in a period where comments wouldn’t go through (And the site was down entirely for a span). This seems to be taken care of now.