It’s that time again – I have nothing to blog about so instead I’ve decided to rifle through my blog stats and share some of them with you, since I always love a link-fest and I’m waaay overdue for one. I have a love/hate relationship with blog stats – on one hand I like seeing how many views I get, what the most popular posts were, how you ended up on my blog … but on the other hand, I hate seeing a shitty traffic day, even though I keep telling myself I don’t really care.

So, anyway, I’d like to give a shout-out to some bloggers who have sent traffic my way via click-overs from their blogs in the past month: The Food Pornographer, A Houseful of Rabbits, A Taste of Home Cooking, Chocolatesuze, Mooiness, Kate in the Kitchen, Mach Cats, The Cat Blogosphere, Kitikata-San, Kittens on the Keyboard, When Cats Attack, Lightening Online, Christina YY’s PinkyLand, Practically Perfect, Our Family Cat-a-Blog, Meezer Tails, The Cupcake Queen Brunei, Buddha on the Road, Cat with a Garden, The Adventures of Freckles & Deb, Cherry Blossom Adventures, Life from a Cat’s Perspective, Koffiekitten, Chow Times, Luna Cafe, Fidgeting About, The Life and Times of Bunnies, The Junk Drawer, Avitable, The Purple Foodie, A Whiff of Lemongrass, Blue Lotus, Cooking During Stolen Moments, Dinner Diary,  CatSynth, Mind of Mog, Last Night’s Dinner, Lady Iron Chef and Camemberu. They are all fabulous blogs and I highly recommend you put aside a few minutes and check them out – you might just find a new favourite!

My search term stats haven’t been too freaky recently, which means I need to write some freakier posts (haha) but I picked out my favourites to share. Funnily enough, I haven’t had that person visit who is always searching how to piss off their neighbours … oh wait, maybe mentioning that will entice them back!

Is it possible to get sunburned in England?
Why yes, yes it is! Phill proved this when he returned from Wimbledon bright red. It was the worst sunburn I’ve ever seen – he literally looked like a beetroot! So yes it is possible to get sunburned in England!

Japanese boys dressed as girls
Hmm, I am assuming this landed you on my Harajuku post? I’m pretty sure the girls were dressed as girls and the boys were dressed as boys though!

How do I stop biting my fingernails?
I don’t have a $50 e-book to pimp you but I do have a post I wrote that might help you if you’re looking to quit biting your fingernails. It is possible but it takes time and a helluva lot of determination.

Obesity in New Zealand 2008
Yeah … I don’t really know how you ended up here. Oh wait … I did mention obese animals I saw on a New Zealand television program in this post – that must be it.

Can you eat garden snails?
Omg – that is gross, but apparently possible! You just have to put them in quarantine for a while before you cook ‘em, but I think I would feel happier knowing any snails I ate were prepared by a chef somewhere, like … Paris.

I still get a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon linking to a few posts I had written before my blog died, so of course, those posts don’t exist anymore. There’s one post more popular than the others and it’s disappointing that the Stumbleupon people end up on a broken 404 page looking for it. So, just because I can, I am going to share with you a blast from the past – I am going to repost it right here for anyone who might have missed it. If you’ve already read it, just skip it. If you haven’t … enjoy!

My Brother, Gay Porn Distributor

My brother is in his early twenties and while we don’t live at home anymore, our bedrooms are pretty much the same for if we return home in the holidays to visit. My brother does return home a fair bit whereas I work and therefore don’t have the same freedom to leave for a few weeks. My Mum likes to keep our rooms clean for us, and recently my mother was tidying up my brother’s room and lifted up the mattress to clean underneath and discovered a pile of DVD’s. These DVD’s were blank, with titles written on them, so they had obviously been burned, not bought.

Mum inspected them.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bad Boys and Bad Boys II.

Her eyes grew wide.

My mum thought my brother was downloading and distributing gay pornography.

Yes, it’s true.

She immediately phoned him, crying and absolutely distraught. My brother was confused and apologised for downloading them, thinking she was over-reacting a lot about him downloading some movies. After a very confusing and emotional phone call, they hung up.

Minutes later, my Mum phoned him back, this time to apologise. She told him that she accepts his decision, that she’s there for him and that she loves him regardless of his life choices. My brother, still thoroughly confused, thanked her for this and the conversation ended.

A couple of hours later, my Dad got home and Mum showed him the DVD’s she had found.

“Look at what your son is watching!” she said, eyes filling once more with tears.

My Dad looked at them, confused, and said, “I’ve seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s quite good.”

My Mother almost had a heart attack!

Dad explained to her that they were movies. Not porn. Not gay porn. Movies.

My Mother was so embarrassed.

She phoned my brother back and apologised for freaking out. She explained she had found the DVD’s stashed under his mattress and thought they weren’t innocent movies. My brother finally understood what had just happened, and now they can laugh about it. But he did comment that if he was gay, he would have preferred a more supportive reaction from his Mum (and I totally agree!) rather than the freaked out psycho reaction he received.

…and you thought your family is dysfunctional!

It’s a true story guys, cross my heart! Well I am off to the city to meet with Mum and Dad – last chance before Mum heads off to England for five weeks on Saturday. Even though I pretty much just got back from England, I’m actually jeaous! Let’s see if I can smuggle myself into one of her suitcases…

Seriously, I think I need to hire a supervisor to watch me use my blog, because recently it seems that no matter what I touch, or what I do, I always end up screwing things up. My most recent failure was last night, when I attempted to upgrade automatically to Wordpress 2.8. I’m assuming if you’re using Wordpress you’ve seen the “Upgrade to Wordpress 2.8!” sign at the top of your dashboard by now? Well, I figured, why not? Anything automatic just has to be easy, right? Besides, I’d automatically upgraded plugins before with no problem, so I was pro.

I clicked the link and it warned me to do a backup. Meh, I’ll be right.

(This is the part where the girl in the movie is running towards an alley…and the audience knows the killer clown is hiding in there, brandishing a knife, and they begin to throw popcorn at the screen and shout “DON’T DO IT!!!!!!” but she can’t hear them and runs into the alley anyway and then the PSYCHO music starts playing and she gets stabbed and DIES and wished that she’d paid attention to the audience and BACKED UP HER BLOG because…)

One click was all it took. A few seconds of loading, then an error message. It seemed that the installation had got halfway through, but then failed. Too bad, I thought, I’ll just have to upgrade another way. I clicked on the Dashboard button absent-mindedly … and got a white page with “index of wp-admin” and nothing else.

Uhh, what?

I clicked on my blog’s link … and got Wordpress’s dreaded white page of death.

There was absolutely nothing there. My blog was a blank page. With one click of a mouse, and in less than one minute, I had killed my blog. I realised this was something that couldn’t be just “undone” I would need to tell Phill what I had done.

Oohhhhhhh, shit.

Phill was sitting with his back to me, doing some work on his computer. I cleared my throat timidly. “Uh, Phill?”

“Yeah?”

“Um, I have a problem. With my blog.”

“What problem?”

“Well, it’s not exactly there anymore.”

A pause, then: “What do you mean, not exactly there?”

He turned and I showed him the blank page. I could see his expression turn from confusement to a furious OH-DEAR-LORD-SHE-KILLED-HER-BLOG in two seconds flat. Through gritted teeth, he said: “What. Did. You. Do?”

I felt myself blush. “I tried to automatically upgrade to Wordpress 2.8 but it didn’t work. It came up with an error message and then I couldn’t load my blog, or the dashboard anymore. They’re just blank now.”

“What did the error say?”

Silence.

“You didn’t write it down, did you? Why did you click away? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FIX IT IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT WENT WRONG????” There was a pause, then: “Did you at least backup before you started?”

I made an apologetic face and he let out a frustrated noise, turned around and started typing away. Tap tap tap. A few swear words. Tap tap. More mumbled swear words. Tap tap tap. He stopped suddenly. “There’s nothing in your wp-admin file. NOTHING. It looks like it got as far as wiping the old Wordpress, but didn’t install the new one.”

My heart sank. My blog was dead … again. Is Wordpress trying to tell me something?

Tap tap tap. Swearing. Sip of water. Tap tap. I felt terrible because I knew he’d had a long day and was tired, and now he was pissed off and cranky. Finally, he turned and said, “Okay, try now.”

I clicked on my blog … and whola, it loaded. Well, it sort of loaded. My template was gone – in place of the patterns was just a big blank blue page. Two of my plugins had been erased. My photos didn’t show up. Phill did some more tapping on his computer and deduced that all of my photos had been erased from the uploads folder. It wasn’t the end of the world, I’d just have to go through and re-add each one. I guess, in a way, it’s lucky that my blog kicked the bucket in April – it means I don’t have two years of posts to go through, just two months’ worth.

At least I had my blog back.

I know I made huge mistakes and my biggest (besides not backing up!) was assuming that clicking the “automatically upgrade” button would just work. I had figured if it didn’t work, everything would go back to normal and it would be as if I hadn’t done anything.I couldn’t have been more wrong! Here are things I should have done before attempting the upgrade.

Things I Should Have Done Before Upgrading my Wordpress Blog

Backup

If I had made a backup, we could have avoided much of the stress and worry.  If you are like me, and wouldn’t know where to start, Lorelle has a really helpful post about backing up your blog. I think some people (me included) just feel like they aren’t going to need a backup, that “it won’t happen to me” – but seriously, my blog has died twice now this year, one time because of me, and the other time because of reasons out of my control. Backing up your blog is very important - especially if you are going to attempt to upgrade and especially if it’s likely you’ll kill it somehow.

Check to see if the theme is compatible with 2.8

The reason my theme didn’t load is because it’s not quite compatible with 2.8. This means I had to find one that was – and, as 2.8 was only released on June 10, it’s likely that a lot of the themes you use or look at, won’t be compatible. Knowing if your theme will survive the upgrade will be useful because you won’t have to find a new one, or attempt to fix the old one, if it’s not compatible. Wordpress has a list of themes that are compatible here.

Check to see if the plugins are compatible with 2.8

Two of my plugins were eaten by the upgrade. We aren’t sure why, but we assume it’s because they won’t compatible. It’ll save a lot of time if you can upgrade your plugins so they will ready to go when the upgrade is complete.  Wordpress has a list of plugins that are compatible here. I also read that you should disable all your plugins before upgrading.

Asked for help from a competent person

Phill hosts my blog and fixes it whenever I kill it … and he was sitting right next to me while I was killing my blog. If I’d asked him for help, this could have been avoided. After my failed attempt at the automatic upgrade, he was able to get into the nitty-gritty stuff and manually upgrade. I’ve actually read a lot that people don’t suggest doing automatic upgrades because, well, they don’t always work, and I agree. Next time there’s an upgrade, I’m just going to get Phill to show me how to do it manually.

Wait until the upgrade is old news and the bugs are gone

Normally I wait a long time to upgrade to a newer Wordpress because I find during the earlier stages of a release, there are bugs and kinks that require fixing. I like to hear other people’s experiences and opinions before making the decision to upgrade now, or wait. The sneaky “auto upgrade” option made me think it would be as easy as upgrading a plugin – and it wasn’t! I didn’t realise the upgrade was so new, didn’t realise many plugins and themes wouldn’t yet be compatible, and I paid the price.

Not skip upgrades

I can’t remember if I started out with 2.7, but I’ve read that skipping upgrades is not a good idea and you’re best off gradually upgrading until you reach the latest release, as too big a jump from your version to the newest can result in problems. If I had an earlier version to 2.7, part of my problem could have been the leap.

___________________________________

Can you think of anything else I should have done? I’d hate for anyone else to go through what we went through last night! Anway, now I’m using Wordpress 2.8 and loving it … but it took me a while to get here, plus a few tears and choice swear words.

Have you upgraded yet? How did it go?

We’ve been having some really lovely rain recently – you know, the sort that hangs around on and off all day, keeping your clothes on the line nice and damp, creating a muddy pond for you to walk through in order to check the mail and, well, basically being a pain in the backside. It wasn’t particularly heavy and there was no lightning, so I was rather surprised when I awoke one morning to realise we’d had a blackout sometime during the early hours. I didn’t really think much of it until I went to post on my blog … and discovered it didn’t load.

Phill hosts my blog from home, using my old university computer, so I went upstairs to check it. It was on and humming along nicely. I was stumped (yes, the extent of my computer knowledge is checking to see if things are plugged in and turned on) so I asked Phill to check it when he got home from work.

So on Thursday night we went into the ‘investigation’ feeling positive, but after a couple of hours we realised that this wasn’t just a simple malfunction. The hard drive was dead. My host was dead, which meant my blog was dead – and all of my blogging history over the past two years was gone. Two years of hard work – posts, photos, links and comments – all gone.

It was a lot to take in. I’m not a blogaholic but it was still a shock to the system to lose so much work. At that point, I realised I had a choice. I could throw in the towel, chuck a tanty and give up OR, I could start again from scratch.

Guess which option I chose?

The first thing we did (after replacing the hard drive – the good thing about living with a geek is the constant supply of random computer parts that he seems to pull out of the wardrobe) was install the latest version of Wordpress. Can you believe I was still on 2.2.2? Let’s just say keeping up to date is not my forte. After the install, I looked around for a new theme – something different, something fresh, signaling a new chapter in my blog. I chose this one because it’s loud, but not overpowering. I’m still modifying it but already I am happy with how it looks. Much better than the default template my site sported for a while after the Wordpress installation – I was chomping at the bit to get rid of that!

I’m still figuring out things, trying to remember the plugins and alterations I had in my last blog. The sheer amount of stuff I’ve lost is overwhelming, but I’m taking it one step at a time. My three (quite large) blogrolls are gone, so I have to build those again from memory using bloglines for help. If I linked to you previously and don’t now, I’m sorry – please tell me in a comment and I’ll add you!

So anyway, just in case anyone actually visited here and wondered why they were getting a 404 page, that’s what happened. Rain is evil. But maybe this is a good thing in the long run.

I hope you enjoy A Byootaful Life – the Sequel.