Fucking websites

And THIS is why I never do anything with my website. I got a new hard drive a few weeks ago for my birthday, and found some old graphics I made for earlier incarnations of this site (fun fact, I was messing around looking on nominet the other day, and I’ve had this domain almost 10 years), which reminded me I meant to make a banner for this blog and change the colours around and stuff. So I figured I’d just steal some of my old graphics and it would be a 10 minute job.

WHY DO I NEVER LEARN!?!?!

I went into the admin page and thought ‘oooh, I guess I could change the theme too, lets have a look at this one…’ and I clicked. I forgot clicking set it as my theme. And I dunno what my old one was called so I messed around changing themes, and didn’t like any of them, so I downloaded and uploaded a couple of new ones. The first one made my entire website grey, and the second made everything white, even the admin pages. So I deleted them, and it worked again, so I pondered, and thought maybe my WP install was a bit old and decided to upgrade it. Except I have such an old version I can’t click an ‘upgrade for idiots’ button, and have to manually install. I read the documentation and all the WARNING!!!!WARNING!!!!! notices and decided I should maybe back up my database first. Cue a long hunt for my server login info so I could get into that side of things. And then another frustrated hunt to remember the login info to get into the phpmyadmin. Eventually I had a backup, and ftp’d all the files to my machine too, so I have it allll backed up.

Then I read some more of the documentation and it said I needed a newer version of php than I had, so I went back to the control panel and did that. Fortunately my host does all that shit for you so you just click a button. Though now I have messages saying “Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/vampy/vampy.co.uk/wp/wp-settings.php on line 235” and similar all over the back end of my site. And maybe the front end too, I’m too depressed to check. Ok, I checked, and yes, it was all over the live site too. AND it was full of bold, which I decided to remove from the line I copied/pasted here, because it kinda makes my eyes hurt and made me felt like my blog was shouting at me for being incompetent, and I don’t like that.

I am hoping that the new version of WP will magically make this go away.

So, this whine is basically to say FUCK YOU WEBSITE, FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EYE, and also to say, if my website looks like shit, I’m clearly still working through the problems. In fact, I’ve probably been working solidly for days without sleep or food.

UPDATE: Oh yes, I fixed you, you evil thing. It is 1am and I’ve not had dinner and the graphic is kinda pixellated and I need to redo it and I’m not sure I like the layout and I’ve lost my ravelry widget and whatever other crap I had on there before. BUT IT WORKS. And it looks better than it did before, though I am not sure if the text panel is too narrow and involves too much scrolling, or if I just think that because I have a huge widescreen monitor and because it’s 1am and I’m hungry and I want it to be perfect but it never will be.

UPDATE PART 2: I changed my mind about the new theme, it really was too narrow, but I found the old theme I was using, put that back, and added some (slightly different) new graphics. Which is all I intended to do in the first place dammit. Still, the new backend is considerably more user-friendly than the old, so I guess I can’t complain too much. I was on a roll, so I also decided to assign categories to all my blog posts which were category-less before, so anyone who actually wants to look back and see my ranting nicely sorted by subject will now have an easier time; and probably really needs to find something better to do with their life.