Month: January 2015

Working on my parents’ computer this evening, and it appears WinZip overrode the built-in zip/unzip functions of Windows. Context menus were only giving me the option of opening my zips with WinZip, but the trial had expired so I couldn’t actually unzip anything.

A manual uninstall of WinZip and a clean install of 7-Zip later, and then I see that the system’s zip functions are suddenly available. It didn’t click until then that they were missing previously.

That’s just evil.

I wasn’t used to that behaviour, since I’ve mostly used WinRAR and 7-Zip for the past decade, and neither of them have overridden the system’s zip handling in my experience.

It looks like the nostalgic shine that WinZip used to enjoy in my memory just got a little marred.

It turns out some posts were inexplicably lost in the reboot. The obvious one is the blue bar photo post I mentioned the other day, but I noticed other posts linking to non-existent posts. And then I got an email from someone mentioning that the Internet Archive has some posts of mine that didn’t make the transfer, either.

My plan was to put a call out for anyone who had the text of my posts in an RSS reader or email, until I came across this guide for selectively importing posts into WordPress. Luckily (and oddly) enough, all those missing posts were still in the export XML file I created before switching hosts.

So long story short: they’re all back.

Long story longer, there were over 60 items that I ended up scouring through my WordPress XML backup file to re-import.

23 of these were published posts, 35 were drafts. Others were unfinished drafts that I was glad to delete immediately.

I have no idea why these didn’t import last time.

I keep taking from this that having extensive backups has saved me from 1) myself, and 2) technical oddities. You never know when you’ll need them…

And yes, I backed up before re-importing, and I’m about to backup again.

.:.

The blues bar is here, by the way.

Another oldie and goodie is this thought from Richard Stallman.

And one more, for the road.

It’s nice to have the site running again. I laughed when I saw my archives, though, as I’ve consistently posted three Januaries in a row. And only in those months.

I relatively recently switched hosts (from Geekstorage to CrocWeb), and decided to do a fresh start with my blog.

So I started fresh. But then tonight, while working with my old site’s sql archive, I accidentally overwrote this site with all my old posts. So I went with rule three and rolled with it.

Obviously none of my media made the sql rebuild trip, so a quick unpack and upload of my old archive’s media folder and I was fully up and running.

I only had one new post from this morning, so a quick repost of that and everything is back to new.

.:.

A few things I’m trying out on the new site — a new theme. Twenty Fifteen. It’s the default, but I’m going with it for a while instead of fiddling with perfection. I actually like it.

Speaking of fiddling with perfection, I’ve stripped back some of the plugins I spent way too much time trying to get working perfectly last time around. As much as I like the style and sentiment of Dave Winer’s paragraph links, I’ll wait on implementing that and others for a while.

I am going to try implementing Alex King/Crowd Favorite’s Threads along the way, though.

.:.

So in the end, it was a search in my archives for a photo of the best little blues bar in Bangkok that ‘prompted’ me to get everything back on this site. And I still can’t find the photo.

That’s life, I suppose.