Chinese New Year 2009

I went to Beeston, Nottingham today to watch the local Chinese community celebrate the Chinese New Year, which this year is the Year of the Ox.

There were lots of performers, including fan dancers, traditional Chinese dancers, Tai Chi demonstrations and a wonderful puppet drama performed by local school children. It was bitterly cold, but in spite of this the event was well attended.

I’ve posted photos I took on my Flickr gallery and on the gallery page here on my blog.

All’s well that ends well

It’s taken a while, but I’m just about back to where I was before this afternoon’s fun. As you might expect, I’ve created a backup of my VPS. I am now back to running Plesk 8, WordPress 2.7, Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6.9.

Don’t you love technology?

Leaving well alone – shoulda

You know those times when you see ‘update’ and off you go and click only to wish you hadn’t? Well, I had one of those moments earlier today with my VPS and Plesk. Plesk told me there are updates available to version 9, so I thought, why not?

• First mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t do a backup prior to updating
• Second mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t research to see if there are any issues that others have found.

So, having clicked update, off it went and updated from Plesk 8 to Plesk 9. The first issue was that it didn’t recognise the license key and refused to work. I re-booted the VPS and that sorted itself out somehow. I then noticed that the left-hand navigation was missing some of the icons. This set me off looking for answers…

Several hours later, I see it’s a wide-spread issue for those of us using Virtuozzo and VPS. It’s borked!

Fortunately, I had taken a backup of the VPS recently (3 weeks ago),  so I decided to restore. First I took a backup of my WordPress database and wp-content directory. I also took screen shots of all of the relevant settings for my domains and email accounts (on the Mac screen print is Mac key+Shift+3 which creates a picture.png file on the desktop – nice).

I then took a backup of the VPS in its current borked state, then restored…

All went well. I have ftp’d my wp-content directory and restored my WordPress database. All is well so far.

Now I just need to go and set up a couple of new domains, email accounts and re-upload all my Joomla and Drupal stuff.

Lesson learned – backup, backup, backup. And I should know better.

My Crafty Life

My Crafty Life

I’ve recently come across a fantastic blog called My Crafty Life featuring the artwork and projects of its author, Dan.

The blog is updated regularly with new projects and ideas, often featuring free template downloads for Craft Robo and Cricut machines. These are normally available from his blog for one week after publication and then can be purchased from his template online store.