dianaschnuth

I mentioned in a recent post that I rediscovered my camera collection when I was looking for a film camera to bring to Hocking Hills. That morphed into a side project to create a new version of the Cameras page I had in a previous iteration of my blog.

Thing is, my WordPress installation uses PHP as its programming language. I haven’t touched PHP since the last time I tried to customize my blog, which was many years ago. Granted, my job as a data nerd has meant I’ve gained some experience in other programming languages, but PHP is not one of them. Also, I haven’t had to touch CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a Very Long Time, so I needed to refresh my knowledge of the possibilities there.

I managed to break my project into a bunch of bite-sized tasks that felt very Agile-esque.

1. Create a custom tag page in WordPress.
2. Retrieve the tag information.
   (Shoutout to Mobilize Cloud for their helpful post from 2016.)
3. Display the tags as tiles, using an unordered list and some basic CSS.
4. Link to each tag page.
5. Display the number of posts for each tag.
6. Display a photo of each camera (tag).
7. Retrieve the date range a given tag was used.
   (This was the hard part, and required doing some research and flexing my SQL skillz.)
8. Enter descriptions for each camera/tag in WordPress.

Next up is making sure my new page works as expected on mobile, uploading photos of all the cameras, and writing up descriptions. After that, I’m sure I’ll come up with some other bells and whistles I’d like to add….

I’ve been grandfathered into a reduced monthly subscription price of IFTTT Pro for years now. This morning, I learned that the feature I use the most, the one I keep my subscription active for, now requires a Pro+ account.

IFTTT stands for If This Then That; it’s basically a lo-code/no-code solution that lets users connect their apps with each other. I used it a lot more often before I started using iOS Shortcuts, and I’ve only continued to use it for things I haven’t been able to convert to a Shortcut — mainly involving my WordPress blog.

Sometimes I have a quick thought that I want to post to my blog. Once upon a time, I created an IFTTT Applet that would take anything I posted to Twitter and import it as a blog entry. You know, in case Twitter ever went belly up or deleted my old tweets (as unlikely as that seemed at the time).

Over time, I started backing off of Twitter and decided to see if I could easily post quick updates directly to my blog using IFTTT. The iOS WordPress app at the time was bloated and clunky — at least, in connection with my webhost at the time — and I refused to even install it on my phone. So I created a “Quickblog” applet in IFTTT that would bring up a simple notes field and a button. Type the note, push the button, and the post was published.

Even after I switched webhosts, even after the WordPress iOS app became something quite usable, my Quickblog button was still so quick and handy that I kept it around.

Fast-forward to this morning, when I noticed something minor but still worth posting about. Swipe to my page o’ widgets, tap Quickblog, type my note, hit the button.

But when I launched up WordPress an hour or so later to add a more descriptive title and maybe another category, I couldn’t find my post anywhere. Not in Published, not in Drafts… so I checked to make sure my IFTTT applet was still connected. Yep… but it last ran in June? I hit the button that would manually run the app. Nothing.

I opened up the applet configuration settings… and there it was, nestled in the WordPress action. I need a Pro+ account to use the WordPress connector now.

Well, shit. How many random thoughts did I think I posted to my blog since June, but that actually went nowhere?

Guess I should have paid more attention when Rob O’Hara aired his IFTTT subscription woes on his own blog. Here I thought I was good to go with my discounted Pro account, when he was complaining about his now-hobbled free account.

Well, IFTTT, it’s been real. You won’t miss my $1.99 per month, and I won’t miss my Quickblog widget.

As previously posted on social media:

I suddenly find myself in search of a new webhost for the first time in FIFTEEN YEARS.

Amazingly enough (my Aunt Sammie would say it’s ESP), I thought to save off a local backup copy of my WordPress database last month, so my blog is not lost.

Micfo never raised my webhosting fees for the entire time I was a customer (which could be one reason they fell behind on their own datacenter payments, resulting in their customers’ data basically being held ransom), so I’ve been overpaying for unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Party’s over.

So, current status: Trying to restore my SQL-based backups and get my blog back up and running. Also realizing that I didn’t actually have the sweet-ass grandfathered-in deal I thought I had.

Update, 10:15pm
I’ve imported every blog entry from my backup, plus the few I’d posted since then (thanks to Aaron pointing out that our RSS reader of choice, Newsblur, had the text cached). I’ve made my theme look pretty seamlessly like it used to (for better or for worse). I’ve imported my blog categories.

Still to do in the near future:

• import comments
• upload and relink images
• reinstall a few key plugins

Considering that it took me about a week of evenings to convert my site from Movable Type to WordPress some eight years ago, getting everything back up and running in a couple of days (including securing a new hosting service and waiting for DNS propagation) really ain’t too shabby.

Me, apparently. I should have taken a backup of not just my WordPress database but also my server files before I decided to update my blog’s theme. The upgrade of the backend database to the newest version of PHP caused zero problems… so I threw caution to the wind and hit that Update Theme button I’d been avoiding for years.

Honestly, I’ve had this same blog design for eight years, and haven’t thought about it much until lately. It’s not like I have a free stretch of time to sit down and implement a new blog design — and it’s not like that’s even close to the top of my priority list. I might carve out an hour to find myself a new pre-designed theme, though.

The only real casualty was my Archive page. It’s completely MIA, because I seem to recall doing something non-standard when I implemented it. Some of my formatting is wonky now, and I haven’t checked my RSS feed (although I think my husband may be the only subscriber, anyway), but whatev.

I wanted to redo that archive page, anyway.