I take it back! I take it all back! Abort your 2.6 upgrade. I write software for a living…I know what happens when stuff is first released! What was I thinking?!?!

Ok, get my point? It wasn’t all pretty afterall. Lots of good stuff but some stuff just doesn’t work as well as it should. e.g. image uploads were a mess for me…I think I will wait for v 2.6.1 or something. I was fortunate enough to have saved everything to roll back…and that was easy and went smoothly. Sorry for the false alarm!

I just upgraded wordpress, the software I use to build this site. Version 2.6 was released in the last few days and adds a number of pretty nice features. I won’t go through them here but check out this video
for info on what has changed. All in all, the upgrade was extremely easy. I just made a backup of the database and my wp-content area. I stopped all wamp services just in case. My instructions didn’t explicitly say to stop them but from experience with Windows services, I figured it couldn’t hurt. The download for the new source was small and speedy. I unzipped and copied everything (except the wp-content dir) into the wordpress root and then carefully copied the new stuff from the downloaded wp-content over the appropriate items in my wp_content (I didn’t want to hammer my mods, themes, etc). I restarted all wamp services and logged in to the site. On initial login, I got a message that I needed to upgrade my database…and there was a nice button to push to take care of it. I pushed the button and 5 seconds later I was in. That’s it. I was so surprised at how easy it was. I haven’t figured out how useful some of the changes will be yet though I especially like captions for pictures and the supposed easier editing in the wysiwyg post/page creator. We’ll see how that part works out. Anyhow, congratulations wordpress for an awesome update!

As you may have experienced, my initial domain name, buzz-honey.com has been up and down and generally all screwed up.  I registered the domain with yahoo in 2005 and had been chugging along with them just paying $8.95 per year to keep the site/name active.  This year, I noticed that they planned to raise the rate to $34.95 per year.  I decided to transfer my registration to another service which is supposed to be an easy process.  I signed up with namecheap.com to transfer my domain and crossed my fingers.  I had to get the transfer password from yahoo so I called them and asked what to do.  They said I needed to cancel my service with yahoo in order for the transfer to take place.  I argued with the technician thinking that it can’t be a good thing to cancel with them.  He assured me that it was the only way to make the transfer happen and that my site would continue to exist as-is until the transfer.  Foolishly, I cancelled my yahoo account and within 2 hours, buzz-honey was down.  Only slightly irritated, I called yahoo back and asked them what happened.  The next technician said that cancelling the yahoo account made them drop the domain and move it to melbourne-it, the company in Australia that they use to register domains.  I gave this technician the name of the first technician and asked him to inform/reprimand him.  Anyhow, I then began the chore of contacting melbourne-it.  Not wanting to make an international phone call, I foolishly decided to send them an email…and then another…and then another.  I got no response until 3 days later.  Even then, the response was a canned blurb.  I was pretty irritated by this point so I purchased the new domain name for this blog from namecheap.com hoping to get something back up and running.  Nameheap did a great job, was quick to respond, had online chat support, etc.  I definitely recommend them.  Anyhow, 6 days passed between domain transfer initiation to  completetion.  Apparently that is not too bad as I have read stories of transfers taking much longer.  Still, it is unacceptable for a domain name transfer to be this much of a problem.  Take heed!