Well that was scary

So this site is my first sole admin experiment with Drupal. As anyone who visited today will know it was rollercoaster. First the site was off line with a nice polite off line message – but for a long time.

So this site is my first sole admin experiment with Drupal. As anyone who visited today will know it was rollercoaster. First the site was off line with a nice polite off line message – but for a long time.

Then it was really messed up looking, basically a long block of text with none of the nice formatting, then it was back in columns but all the images were gone. And finally it probably looks like just what it started out like. So basically what happened was that I was installing the update from Drupal 6.1-6.2. And I was over confident in that ‘I’ve done this once why would I need to look at the instructions second time around’ sort of way. Not smart. The update process is long and messy, its not a nice ‘click on this button’ sort of thing, more of a ‘keep track of 40 different things while you useless web interface doesn’t do what you think it has’ sort of thing. And then towards the end you remember that you didn’t log into the first account before you took the whole thing off line. And you can’t do so now. And you discover you can’t actually edit the settings file because of either your lack of knowledge or the useless hosting package. And you discover that you can’t delete it either and this seems to be because Drupal 6 installation meant it was created by the server and not you. And you basically looking at that polite ‘site offline message’ and banging your head off the screen – its never going to come back is it. After doing this for a while, messing around a lot and giving up at least twice you finally get around the settings problem. Then we get to the site simply looking messed up but at least the text is back. Thats turns out to be easy to be fixed but there is no images – somehow they got deleted probably by the web interface not having copied them when you thought it had. Now that is annoying, the raw photos are all on your hard drive but do you want to go through the process of manually opening them , transferring them, resizing them, uploading them some 40+ times. You can live without them. Thirty minutes later you remember that you weren’t as dumb as you thought. You did back up the entire site to your hard drive before starting out that morning. And sure enough after a bit of searching and extracting there are the images. Five minutes more work and everything is back to normal. All this while your life is falling apart in slow motion.