I can’t believe I just did this…

Using the WordPress Automatic Update plugin (WPAU), I actually upgraded from WordPress 2.5 to 2.6 successfully. Not without a lot of hassle, but successfully.

The first thing that happened was that after the upgrade, I couldn’t log back in to my administrative dashboard. No way, no how. So I googled for an answer and learned that there’s a damn bug in the WPAU, and that the only way to log back in is to delete your browser cookies! AAAAGHH!!! Fortunately, Safari let me see a list of all the cookies — there were hundreds, at least — which meant that I could selectively delete the half-dozen or so that seemed to be related to the blog. Good Lord, it worked!

Once I was able to actually finish up and everything was running right, I promptly messed it up again by changing one little piece of the blog address in the “general settings” just to see what that would do — too smart by half, I am — which left me utterly unable to log in again to the dashboard… Things were so FUBAR, nothing worked, including a succession of new passwords I kept requesting and trying. Then I had an idea:

Since I’d already backed up the database earlier in the evening, I decided to log into the MySQL database server at my hosting service and import the previous database, which hopefully still retained the correct blog address setting. Big risk! But by that point, what did I have to lose? Well, what do you know, it worked. High geekery, chilluns, but I saved the site.

Then of course I had to request yet another new password to log in, and this time it worked, and after that I had to go back in and update everything I’d tweaked before I replaced the new database with the old one, which is why it’s now 3:00 a.m. But everything works! I think…

Don’t try this at home! Okay, I did, but I didn’t have a choice, and it was good for me to see I could actually fix it. There’s no better way to learn than to make as many mistakes in as short a time as possible, hoo boy. And that’s why you’re now viewing version 2.6 of this WordPress blog installation, which seems to be a good bit snappier.

And now, to bed.

UPDATE: Arrghh. It appears that upgrading to version 2.6 has broken the inline comments. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, the old-fashioned comments work just fine.