Dork Reports

I forget that every time I try to make improvements to one of my blogs, I end up spending hours doing a bunch of stuff before I can even get to making improvements. Tonight’s goal was to make photoblogging a tad bit easier now that I’ve completed uploading my pictures to Picasa. It’s been a frustrating night of installing plugins only to discover my PHP needed to be upgraded, only to discover that even with upgraded PHP, said plugins were incompatible with my Picasa privacy settings. After researching for other plugins and failing, I decided the only other alternative would be manually inserting images into my blog via image URLs. If that’s what it takes, I guess that’s fine.

But then of course I ran into another problem: image sizes. For some reason when I wrote my New Year’s post, the images automatically resized to fit within the column width. I don’t recall making any CSS updates, or upgrading WordPress, but when I tried again today, my images were gigantic and breaking the page (in the sense that they were overshooting into the sidebars). Sure, after inserting the image URL I could have gone to the post, clicked on the image, then clicked on “Advanced settings” and manually inserted the desired image size, but the idea of doing this for every single image I want to blog about kind of makes me wanna die.

So I figured I might as well upgrade to the latest version of WordPress to see if that fixed the problem (after failing to fix the situation by trying another browser – wishful thinking, I know). But of course in order to do that, I had to backup my database, so as not to risk losing all my posts, and just because it’s good to do. Well, I had forgotten my password to my database, and a somewhat hasty but thorough search for my notes proved futile, so I had to reset my password, after several frustrating attempts to log in. Then I couldn’t log in, because apparently my username was incorrect. So I found my username, logged in, backed up my database, then went back to the site. “Error establishing database connection.” I almost had an aneurysm. I seriously thought I broke the site somehow until I remembered that I had to reconfigure a WordPress file to update my new database password. This required going into my FTP (at least that was automated for me because I sure as hell don’t remember my FTP login) to download, modify, then re-upload the file.

So finally, I was in the position to upgrade WordPress, clicked a button, waited a few minutes, and breathed a sigh of relief when the installation completed without a problem. Then I tested out the image function again, and the damned thing did not resize. All that effort for nothing. I changed the media size settings, that didn’t work. I tried to change the CSS, that didn’t work. Then, as a last ditch effort, I tried to post to WordPress’s support forum even though it had about a 1% chance of getting read. Of course that was no easy task either, as I couldn’t remember my login, had to register for a new one, got logged in, then when I went to post, it made me log in again, and then told me my password was incorrect. I tried to reset the password but still haven’t received an email. So now, I’m out of ideas to Google, frustrated and about to give up, and I can’t even ask WordPress for a solution because tonight’s one of those night’s where things are just not meant to work.

And with my luck, I’m sure the minute I figure it out, and start posting about this past year’s bonanzas with glee, my database will either corrupt, or I’ll accidentally delete everything and just sit there fuming about my stupidity. “At least I have my memory,” I’ll say. “This blog is just a backup.” And then I’ll crack my head open and forget it all.