Chaoselbows.com Life, like your elbow, is chaos

Ok, so here we are, now the website has been upgraded, re-colorized, thrashed, re-upgraded, reloaded from backup, upgraded again, rebuilt from old entries, and so on.

Some things work, really, most things, but some things arent working properly yet. I am sure you can figure out what is and isn't working. I have worked on the site in all my spare time ever since I accidentally converted to php5 and broke, well, everything. The old site, which was running on php4, was simply incompatible with 5 in so many ways. but we're back, and I hope to be better than ever. I haven't got some of the "money" making things set up yet, but since over the course of the website they have made me about zilch, I am not too worried about them.

I am working on upgrades to the eist and website family. i.e. the various sites that I am supposed to be keeping working here. The good news is that the site upgrade process is pretty straight forward. The bad news is that as soon as I upgrade a site, I get a redirect error on it. Soo, I am still working on this. I have about an hour a day to devote to this process, which doesent seem like much.

What I have to do to upgrade:
1. back up the database
2. back up the site.
3. upgrade to drupal 4.7.1
4. upgrade to 5.0
5. upgrade to 5.1(possibly the dev pack, still investigating an issue with the upgrade file.)
6. test.

So I am stuck on testing now.

add to that and the ongoing yet mysterious mail problem (mail usually gets through, but not always) and this is a pretty busy hour. I have started getting up at 5 am to give me time to futz with it.

I have found that it usually takes 2 calls to ipower to get them to do something, so I have started making a practice of calling them twice in succession, waiting through their repetitive new age calming hold music and asking them to do the same thing again. Usually this works.

Of course, since my domain "expired" for them and i have my domain for "life" and it is "locked' there is a huge hassle getting my domain back from them. I thought I transferred it successfully last week, but friday they claimed it back (or I never transferred it?) and on october 3 it expired. Since I registered this back in 2002, and I have changed emails since then, and I can't get the email address back (it was on a different a roadrunner account and once you create it it is in use for all time) my only choice to keep the site running is to pay ipower a different 7.00 fee to renew my domain. and I can't get them to just subtract it from the 200 dollars or so they owe me for work they never did and renewing my whole account without warning which I told them I didn't want.

Well, it look like all went ok during the site move. I am absolutely astonished as I have done this once before when ipower moved me to a different server. That move was a complete nightmare.

This one hasn't been fun, but it has gone much better than I thought it would have.

So, What's going on?

Ipower, in its infinite wisdom, restarted the mysql database program in the middle of a cron job. So, all the tables that were open on this and the 10 other websites (or so) were corrupted. That's why the content looks funny, no one has any access to it, the access and organic group tables being the ones that were open. This is true for ALL the sites. I am trying to fix them as soon as I can move the pointers from ipower to here. So, it will be another day at least while things stablize. The annoying part is that the crash came just after I spent a lot of time on things here. At least half the time was reloading modules, since I think ipower was having serious problems with disk space or something, since I couldn't get the files to show up properly.

I just updated the website. Since This website serves three purposes I am happy to say that the update appears to have gone swimmingly. however, if you notice something more odd than usual, feel free to tell me about it by commenting here, or assigning me a task to fix it, or whatever strikes your fancy.

This was a security update, so no cause to be alarmed. go about your business as usual....

I think that I am going to switch from taxonomy access control to organic group access control. I think this may work better for our needs. Basically this means that you can create groups and allow people to join them, but also restrict content based on group memberships. For example, restrict the dragon forums to members whom have demonstrated an interest in them.

What do you think?