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September 9th, 2010
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Once again my WordPress upgrade was hellacious and it is always the same two things: plugins and text in Asian characters i.e. Chinese and Japanese. Luckily after three fruitless days of updating and rolling back there appears to be a simple fix to the Asian text turned to gibberish upon WordPress upgrade problem.

You’d think they would fix this in the documentation or at least want to get some of the billions of people who type in 中文 to use WordPress instead of some made in China clone.

Now I just have to get all the plugins working again, plus finish optimizing my site according to this tutorial, then finally I can do what I want which is have the music I’m currently listening to appear in the sidebar. Long time readers will remember I already had that, that’s right, just to duplicate functionality I already had took three whole days and a lot of debugging and I still do not have it working. In fairness I’m trying to improve on the functionality due to now using Last.fm to scrobble my music as I listen to it.

The other problem I had was although I backed up, I couldn’t actually import the XML version of my blog due to the WordPress Importer not working. First it doesn’t seem to like if you upload to a non-standard directory, then it didn’t like the size of the file, but it wasn’t too large it was some setting in php.ini I had to change to finally make it work, but that didn’t solve my Asian font issues.

Then there were the issues I had before the Asian font issues reared their ugly head, those never got any love on the WordPress help forum either.

Now I have to get Simple Tags working and then maybe I can use that to tag all my old posts. I also think the 8000 Spam comments need deleting from my database after the file size issue. It is all my own fault as I looked at what other plugins were popular or were considered ‘must have‘ by self professed experts. Were these ‘experts’ using WordPress five years ago, and have they been updating the same database and blog for that long, I doubt it somehow…

Things seem to be working well enough that I will leave the house. I never did that yesterday, it was all WordPress hacking, ftp’ing, Googling, job searching, and Bejeweled Blitz playing. Luckily Facebook’s new iPhone app seems to have busted that. Now we’ll see if I can’t get my sidebar to behave and get my new plugin mojo working.

Update January 2019

I’ve spent so much time updating WordPress and blogging. The ROI is just not worth it, yet I persist in my folly. My latest update was to WordPress 5.0 and I’ve tried to make this blog and entire website work better inside the Great Firewall as I’ve spent too long living in China considering how poor my Chinese is. I came very close to achieving my desires but still I can’t convince people to hire me, even interview me. Maybe I should finally try to pass myself off as a WordPress expert.

3 Comments

  • Muskie says:

    Well that's it, I'm leaving it broken. Otherwise I'll never get out of my apartment. I need dishwashing detergent. I also need to do the laundry. Oh the Pernice Brothers are good, hopefully I spelled that correctly….

  • Muskie says:

    Still the same problems with the conditional tests for single pages, tag archives and date archives… I swear I've blown away all the old code with Transmit, even forcing it to overwrite everything manually, but the problem remains…. Maybe it is in wp-admin somewhere…

  • Muskie says:

    Damn my weird conditional problem is back. I managed to fix that before but then I broke my Asian fonts… It is something where the automated updater fails to update some file when it goes from WordPress 2.7.1 to WordPress 3.0.1 I had to download the release and manually update various files…

    Sad that the updater creates this bug. No one seemed to believe me so I wrote some code in my sidebar to prove it…

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