One of those wasted, pointless days when something old and computer related gets updated, instantly destroying your old work. Today I updated my websites to use the latest PHP version. There are only a few changes, mostly to the database access code and the shopping cart systems.
But, I have 7 websites (my main art site, IndieSFX, Lost in Flatspace, Pentangel Books, Cornutopia Software, Cornutopia Music and Bytten Reviews) and each has several pages, sometimes several hundred. My main art website has over 1000 pages alone (not counting one page that can show several things; my painting page for example can show any painting, if I counted all of those as separate pages, my site would easily be 2000 to 4000 pages large). Each page that accesses a database needs updating and that means hundreds of lines of code that need changing, all just to stand still and produce a website that was, at best, exactly the same as it was before. This sort of nightmare situation is something every programmer must simply tolerate. Perhaps my years of doing things like this was training to work for no reward!
Fortunately, I have created a program that can search and replace a specific text stream, and search for it across a folder of files and, also fortunately, I tend to use the same code across each site, so I've used this to batch convert all 3000 or so files and, in each, search for the five troublesome lines that need transforming. Then I needed to make a few changes to the shopping cart, but this had to be done by manual search and replace in each file.
It's taken all day to get back to where I started, but now everything is updated to the latest version. A few odd symbols now appear on my site; characters like é and £ now need the correct HTML, but these are minor issues. Apart from that no creative work was done and it's been a frustrating day. I hardly feel like an artist. I must rush my music through, but it feels like I'm pushing through a thick soup that goes thicker as I push harder (a dilatant colloid?). I must work at it, work harder, push against these forces.
