BloggingAmigos

Personal Saviors or Angels of Death?

I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Automated things are just so easy and great to use, right? Well, sometimes. If they truly are all they’re cracked up to be, they’ve usually gone through some heavy testing, usage, and many revisions. This past week I decided I was finally going to upgrade to the new version of Wordpress on my personal blogs. I also decided to try out this nifty updater plugin they were promoting.

I first tried it out on my personal blog, ran into a lot of permission issues, and gave up. Then I played around with it some more, and gave up again. Fast-forward a few days and I decided to give it a third try, cause that’s the one that’s always supposed to work. This time I decided to try it out on my movie blog. Same problems, yet this iteration I did a little homework and tried changing some permissions around. I eventually got to the very end of the installation, but had pages and pages of errors and my blog didn’t work…at all. Part of the updating process was to create a backup. I tried to open these files and could not because Microsoft Windows had deemed them to be unsafe.

By this time I’m sure you can image my frustration and annoyance at my self-perceived stupidity at 1)trusting an auto-updater to fix my blog, 2)not doing my own backup, and 3)not trying this out on something I don’t care about. I think it’s fair to say I’m above-average when it comes to technical things, but I don’t have that much experience troubleshooting web issues. I’m going to have to recommend most of you bloggers out there avoid this upgrader unless you’re very comfortable with file permissions, and tracking down errors within specific lines of PHP code. Even if you are comfortable doing that kind of stuff, is it really worth the risk of having to spend the time on it?