Uh, yeah, isn’t that scary – CHRISTMAS is very soon! It’s SEPTEMBER already, which is when I start getting excited about Christmas because it’s one of the months that end in “ber” and you know that only happens around the end of the year! My birthday will be in Canada and so will Christmas – hopefully a white Christmas, which would be absolutely amazing for us Aussies whose closest thing to “snow” is a snow cone!

I can’t believe it’s less than two days to go!

P.S – I apologise if images haven’t been showing up in your RSS feed. We’ve recently added a new code to protect my photos from being hotlinked and in order for them to show up in your feed, we have to manually approve each feed reader site. I get an email whenever a site tries to access my images, so if it’s a reader site, we’ve been adding it straight away to the approved list, which fixes the problem, so images from subsequent posts will appear like normal in your feed. Sorry about that and it should all be fixed soon.

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For example, this is what my current blog layout looks like on my phone:

So, not terrible (in fact, this layout appears to be a little better than my last one!) but imagine trying to read that while on the bus or walking. You’d have to basically zoom in (unless your eyesight is out of this world!) which would result in you probably having to move the enlarged text around in order to read the entire paragraph, then if you wanted to leave a comment you’d need to click on the “comments” image, wait for it to load the entire page again, then leave a comment (don’t forget to zoom in again and make sure your fingers don’t accidentally hit any other buttons while you’re at it!).

I figured there’s got to be something easier.

Then I visited The Food Pornographer’s blog on my phone and saw that she had a completely different layout customised for mobile phone users. It was quick to load and gave me the content I really cared about – the posts and photographs – without having to load the header, sidebars and other nice bloggy things that aren’t really needed when you’re low on screen space. The layout also scaled her paragraphs and photos to my iPhone screen, meaning I didn’t have to drag the page over to read everything – it was already there and I could just scroll down as I read.

Isn’t that such a simple, to-the-point layout? To read the post, it’s as easy as clicking on the title…

…and it’s all there, easily scaled to your window (images and text) and easy to read. Scrolling down is easy too because it can’t go left or right, so you’re not going to accidentally scroll over to one side when the bus hits that bump in the road. To leave a comment, it’s even easier…

…because the comment form is already there, waiting for you to leave some luvin’! You’ve got less things to click on and less things to load which adds up to a happy blogging experience. I decided I wanted my blog to be this easy to view on a mobile phone, since my experience with using The Food Pornographer’s site via my phone was so much more pleasurable than other blogs that hadn’t been optimised for mobiles.

After trying out a few plugins, I settled on WPtouch iPhone Theme which is free and really simple to use – just install it and activate it and that’s it! There are some settings you can change (like I unticked “hide excerpts” which is ticked by default) but they are all pretty straight-forward and easy to understand. As soon as it’s activated, your blog will switch to the mobile theme when viewed by a mobile phone. If it accidentally displays as the wrong theme, there is a link in the footer which allows the viewer to switch back to the normal theme, so you’re not going to find yourself accidentally viewing the wrong one.

The plugin comes complete with a list of enabled mobiles (like iPhone, blackberry etc) but you can also add your own if it’s not on the list – this helps the plugin notice the site is being visited by a mobile phone. You can also change the colours, background pattern and how many things like categories and tags you want to include.

After activating the plugin, here is my blog when viewed on my iPhone:

I did a little customisation to it – changed the background to the “thatches” option and added my own little icon of a chocolate cake I made a while back, decorated with little sugary flowers and love hearts. Click on a post and you see this:

…and continue scrolling to the end of the post in order to…

…leave a comment! You can see that the mobile theme works well with most plugins, including the CommentLuv plugin I have installed (which of course pulls your latest post from your own blog). You can also turn off the mobile theme here, to return to the normal layout.

Now, I know that I probably don’t get a lot of visitors viewing my blog via their mobiles, but if it makes reading it easier for the one or two people who might, without adversely affecting my regular layout, then my work here is done. It’s free, it’s quick and it’s easy!

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I wanted a fresh start for our trip and seeing as we only have one week (!!) before we’re boarding a plane to America, now is as good a time as any. I can’t believe there is only one week – I am so excited! We’re flying into LA and staying there for about a week before heading to Seattle, then onto Vancouver. Just typing that makes my heart flutter with anticipation!

We’ve still got heaps to do – packing, storing, organising – but we’re getting there.

ONE WEEK TO GO !!

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Looks like it’s fixed now, thank goodness! Watch out for a new post tonight. Have a great day everyone!

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1. Phill managed to get another modem which means I can access my blog again like normal, which means I can get back to posting and commenting. I probably have a gazillion blogs to read, since I haven’t really had use of my laptop for a couple weeks (so it might take me a while to get to your blog)

2. The new power pack *just* arrived and IT FITS! We were a bit worried because we ordered it online and it wasn’t the same brand as my old one, but we had checked the specs and it seemed the same – and it is! We plugged it in and the charging light immediately came on – phew! This morning my laptop had refused to even turn on, that’s how empty the battery was, and although I could get the power pack to light up, I couldn’t seem to get the electricity from there to my laptop – it was that connection that was dead. I’ve missed my laptop so much and while a break from the internet was great, I’m also relieved that it’s back.

I was worried it would take a long time to get this all fixed, but everything has worked out and I’m excited about blogging again. Perhaps this was all for a higher purpose – my blogging mojo was waning and I guess maybe not being able to blog made me want to even more. It’s funny how you want something you can’t have.

But wait – I can now, so what am I doing? I’d better get to it!

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how to get cement off a car
Okay, we’re all thinking it so I’ll put it out there – how on earth did you get cement on your car in the first place? Is it like a little scraping of cement, or a big block smack bang on the roof? I want pictures! As for how to get it off … no idea. I assume some Spray’n'Wipe just won’t do the trick in this situation.

my cat is addicted to fish and chips
You feed your cat fish and chips?! This is how to fix your cat’s addiction – STOP FEEDING IT FISH AND CHIPS! A cat can’t (as far as I know) work a deep fryer, so if you stop providing it with the fish and chips, it’ll stop eating it. Unless it’s a really smart cat, I guess. But still – fish and chips? You’ve got to be kidding.

you ate my f@&ing cat
No, I didn’t.

it’s my day off and my cat woke me up at 3am
Join the club! Solution is to close your bedroom door, or put your cat in the garage or laundry (with food, water, toys and kitty litter) for the night. Trust me, you’ll thank me for the uninterrupted sleep.

how to quit biting your nails without buying anything
It’s all in your head – your determination and commitment is what is going to make you stop biting your fingernails. You can buy things like nail strengthener or nasty tasting nail polish, but those are add-ons – if you are really determined to quit, put your mind to it and you can do it. I would recommend buying a nail file – something you can use when you’re tempted to bite, because you want to turn that moment into a positive moment for your nails.

where is codfish sperm manufactured from?
No idea, but Phill’s eaten some in Japan before. Heh.

bathing your cat for the first time
Be prepared! Check out my post on how to bathe your cat here. Remember not to bathe your cat when it’s cold because they can get sick very quickly. Good luck!

i gave my cat a bath she’s licking herself dry will that damage her?
No – cats instinctively lick themselves to clean and dry themselves. If the shampoo isn’t all washed off, excess consumption of shampoo can make a cat sick, so make sure you use pet shampoo, not human, and thoroughly rinse the shampoo off. You can dry your cat with a towel and let her lick the rest dry.

my sister wedding porno gay
Uh… what?

cute aussie blogger
Why thank you!

me and my cat neck
Wait … doesn’t “neck” mean “make out”? You and your cat make out? Uh, backing away now…

Haha they were pretty interesting. What are some of the weirdest search terms you’ve encountered on your blog?

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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…

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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.

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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?

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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.

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