Yesterday’s hail storm here in Perth caused quite a few surprises about the place. I quite enjoyed the wind, thunder and rain bit, it made me feel nostalgic. Wading through suspicious brown soup which came halfway up my thighs to get out of my train stop was the less pleasant part.

It so happens that the hail smashed the windows in the club room of our former hosts, the UCC. Were it not for the otherwise traumatic move to the new server, troppo would have been down and out for at least a few days.

The Great Troppo Migration of 2010 continues to be approximately 10,000 times more stressful than planned.

The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.
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Remember my famous catchcry, “Victory!”

The one in the post just below Nicholas on G2.0.

Yep. I trusted Wordpress to do the right thing. Silly me.

It thoughtfully dropped everyone’s email when migrating you to the new server. This means that the approach I’ve used previously — “here’s the link to reset your password, it will email you a new one” — doesn’t work.

So, friends and Troppo authors, if you’re having trouble logging in, please email me first so I can restore your email details to the system.

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.

Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.

Today (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.

Update: Ahem. The move will take longer than anticipated — it will probably happen Sunday instead.

Update 2: To prevent people being from being upset by their bon mots going missing, I’ve temporarily suspended commenting while the posts and comments are moved to the new server.

Update 3: Failure. Attempt 1 used the native Wordpress WXR export/import toolset, which didn’t work. Attempt 2 (today) broke the export/import down per author, which didn’t work. Most annoyingly it strips out <embed> tags of the sort used for YouTube videos.

It looks like I will need to do it “the hard way”, which involves dumping and loading databases after passing them through some data-munging gymnastics. So it looks like troppo will be staying where it is for another week.

I’ve re-enabled comments.

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

Feel free to express your hatred, dread etc etc below.

Update: Just to add insult to injury, our server internet connection failed for about an hour.