For those of you who missed it, I made the dangerous decision to upgrade my blogs coding to something from this decade today, and well...I broke things. This isn't a surprise given that I am a mostly self trained "push buttons until it works again" sort of techie.
What is surprising is that I got it working again. And even more surprising is that it wasn't actually my fault that it got broken in the first place. Well, not completely anyway. Out of the four thousand some on files that I had to upload, it would seem that fate deemed it necessary that I skip about 47 of them. Murphy's law being what it is, those 47 files just had to be ones that if not updated, would conflict with the new coding and lead me to stare at the screen in horror at a long list of semi-nonsensical error messages referencing php conflicts in various lines of code. It was nearly enough to make angels weep and me suddenly decide to jump ship. Nearly enough, but not quite.
Instead I grabbed a seriously full mug of coffee and settled down to start monkeying with things, figuring that if I broke it worse, there wasn't going to be much difference. As it turns out, it only took me an hour to locate the errant files and get them wiped and replaced with fresh new files and voila! My corner of the web has been upgraded, spit polished and returned.
Technology is a funny thing. It's intimidating to work with at first, with more than its share of technobabble and unfriendly error messages. But in reality it's just like every other machine. It needs to be tweaked, poked, prodded and occasionally given a swift kick to the processors. You just have to be brave enough to tinker with it.