Reward after fixes and headache

This past weekend was supposed to be a weekend full of making art uninterrupted for as long as I wanted because both my daughter and husband were out of town.  Instead, I spent all weekend fixing my website and WordPress blog after I accidentally deleted it.  Luckily, I was able to restore my wordpress blog from a back up database using phpMyAdmin in the Cpanel of my server, but after uploading it, I was faced with 100′s of missing images, funky characters littering my old posts and a theme that wasn’t working anymore.  Arghhh.

While I was relieved to have recovered all my posts, I have been obsessed (maybe even possessed) the past 7 days with finding a fix for my missing images and the odd characters like  and †showing up in my older wordpress blog posts (all posts that were written before upgrading to 2.6).   The thought of editing every single one of my 422 posts was making me nauseous and sent me on a quest to repair everything.

Here’s sort of what went wrong.  I created a new database for my blog and decided to start from scratch and did a new install of WordPress on my server.  I then proceeded to  add my theme and plugins folder to the new install using the ftp function to my server.  At this point, it’s still a fresh install since there is no content.  I researched and researched on how to restore a database from a backup and it worked great with the exception of missing images and the funky characters.

Problem #1 – I uploaded and activated the Automatic Upgrade Plugin after my fresh install – which was perhaps foolish to do before restoring my database.  I was feeling confident and thought this was a terrific idea at the time since I wanted to take care of all my to-dos right from the get go.  I went from WordPress 2.5.1 to 2.6 – though I had already upgraded from previous versions of WordPress.

Problem #2 – It shouldn’t really have been a big deal, but a lot of my posts were from previous versions of WordPress.  I found out that there was likely a character set mismatch with previous versions and the new 2.6.  Older versions of WordPress used latin1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation (which refers to western languages) and newer versions use UTF-8 which is a universal unicode that helps blogs be accessible across the globe regardless of language spoken.  Sure enough, I looked at my database in phpMyAdmin and I had both a latin1 and utf8 in there.  I followed all the steps in the convert your database to utf8 found here and crossed my fingers before hitting “go” on my computer.  And, while utf8 is supposed to translate latin1, my old blog posts were still showing the funky character sets after converting the database.

Problem #3 – I should probably tell you that at this point, I had wisely backed up everything once again and saved it to my computer just in case.  I think that part of my problem was that before backing up my database correctly the first time around, I only had a backup thanks to my host who provides weekly backups.  Thank God I had that though and I won’t make that mistake again!  A proper backup involves deleting your blog’s cache before executing which is where I think I may have run into all my problems since I was relying on my host’s backup info.  Incidentally, I have deleted the old cache file since discovering all this.

In the meantime, I was getting frustrated and was definitely not working in the studio.  I decided to switch gears and to figure out what went wrong with my photos.  When I checked my “media library” in my Worpdress dashboard, my images showed the correct file names, but when I clicked on the image, I was informed that they were “not found”.  I went back and double checked my database and could clearly see the images when I looked inside the table called “wp-content” (which stores the core of all your post data) under the field called “post_mime_type”.  Here’s where I found problem #4 - my old images were stored as http://coloradoartstudio.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/picture.jpg since my old install was under a subdirectory of my domain and I uploaded my new install under my domain http://coloradoartstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/picture.jpg  with no subdirectory.  My media library was reading the text, but not the actual image.

The fix – I found a cool plugin called Search and Replace that I uploaded to my wordpress files using ftp and which enabled me to search my wordpress database for the old upload folder and replace it with the new one.  Success!  My images were all back, except for the month of August that were written before I restored – so I only have to manually update about 5 posts.  I can do that.  If I had the know how to mess with MySql commands, I could have done it there.  But, the plugin which you access from your blog dashboard makes it easy for non technical people like myself.  Huge sigh of relief.

Now, if your head hurts after reading this, then you get an idea of what I was going through.

After that success (which happened last night btw), I was on to something and didn’t want to let it go.  I was getting closer and closer to finding the fix for the funky character on old posts issue now.  A part of me was saying, just let it go.  Who cares since it’s still readable.  But, I do care how my blog looks.  I ended up going to bed last night after midnight with no success.

I think the phrase, “sleep on it” has merit.  I woke up around 6 am this morning so that I could have a little coffee before going to teach my 9am class at the Art Student’s League and time to check emails etc.  Now, I normally reserve this time for writing blog posts, visiting blogs, responding to emails etc., but of course this morning, my mind was still on the stupid character set problem even after converting my database to utf8.  I also tried another fix which involved deleting a couple of lines in my-config.php file – this did remove the funky characters in the old posts, but gave my new posts the same problem.  So, I was back to the search.

Problem #5 – Further sleuthing, led me to this post on the wordpress support forum and then this post and this one which led me to believe that it was the double space after a . that was causing a  to follow every period followed by another sentence, hence the coding mismatch.  I found out that double spaces after a full stop (or a .)  is considered old school and reserved for actual typewriters technology and not for the web.  Guess what?  I learned how to type in 1982 on an old IBM Selectric and was taught to double space – old habits die hard.

After banging my head on my computer a few times, I decided to try the Search and Replace Plugin that I had used the night before to restore my images.  So so simple.  I entered  on the “replace” line inside the plugin and replaced it with nothing – not a unicode for a space, just left it blank and voilá.  The issue is solved.  There are still a few posts with other weird characters, but they’re not as pervasive as the  following a period and now I know how to fix them.

So, now what?  I can concentrate on restoring the images for my pre 2.6 posts for the month of August and I can start creating a custom page template for my static pages.

In all my manic, I also installed Xampp after reading this tutorial on how to install wordpress on my computer so that I can mess around (play) with my blog without fear of destroying my live blog.

So, I’m signing off for the night and hopefully, I’ll stop obsessing and get back to normal.

~Cynthia

Now, I gotta hope that after I click on “publish” that everything looks normal….