Muskblog is back and better

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 that was previously documented be Selina Lai.

Ironically in 2025, almost 15 years later I encountered this problem once more when I changed web hosts. It seems my database schema was never fully modernized and I’ve been using various workarounds upgrade after upgrade, year after year. There are few WordPress blogs that are twenty years old. Selina Lai’s blog is now only in the Wayback Machine but Muskblog is once again back online and may be better than ever.

Getting all the plugins working again is always a pain, 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. But fifteen years later that expert’s website is gone but mine remains.

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.

Over the years

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 major 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 especially 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.

This entry was originaly posted on September 9th, 2010, it was last edited on August 10th, 2025 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Chinese, Plugin, WordPress.