Home of the Wanderer

Let this be a lesson to you: always back up the database before upgrading. Always. Even when upgrading has never broken anything before.

For lunch, I finished the final bowl of last week’s soup, and started pondering what to make this week.

I pulled out my spreadsheet of local seasonal foods, and started looking through the protein section. Since I knew I’d be sharing the meal with a pesca-vegetarian, I ignored most of the meat, and my own allergy to mushrooms left many other local protein sources off the menu. Thus, I was down to seafood, and I thought – hey, why not make a clam chowder?

So I did, but without any clams. The store had none. Instead, I used cod.

And I didn’t exactly follow Mark Bittman’s recipe, either. Nor did I follow this (inspiring) recipe. I knew I wanted to make another mirepoix, though, and that this time I wanted to do a white mirepoix (with parsnips instead of carrots, to keep the broth clear). So I went and got parsnips, celery, an onion, a leek, a few potatoes, some parsley, and the cod.

After washing, peeling, and cutting everything, and starting the stock brewing, I sautéed the various veggies together “until the onions [were] transluscent and the potatoes [started] to brown.” I added the broth, and simmered it all together, the broth barely covering the rest.

It was fun to watch the potatoes disintegrate into the chowder.

Five minutes before dinner was due to be served, I added the cod. Immediately before serving, I added the cream (actually, Silk creamer), salt, and pepper. I very nearly forgot the parsley, and I’m glad that I didn’t because it was absolutely essential to the flavor of the food.

I took a bunch of pictures, but I haven’t yet figured out which wordpress plugin I want to use for photoblogging.

Okay, so part of the reason I never quite got around to switching this blog to drupal was because I so dislike the process I’ve gone through when trying to upgrade from one version of drupal to the next. Perhaps that’s because I had customized a few of the modules I had installed, but nevertheless it was challenging. I had to refigure it out every time I made the attempt.

Now, as careful readers may have noticed, I have just upgraded the version of wordpress used to run this site. There was a security issue of some kind, and I don’t like leaving holes in the walls, so I dug in and prepared for a long and perilous task. Or, in any case, I took a look through the upgrade instructions. They looked simple and straightforward enough – delete and then replace a few directories and files, restore the ones you backed up earlier (you did back them up, right?), and you’re done.

I thought to myself that this could be even easier. Because I don’t have wordpress installed in the documentroot, or even in the main directory where my web server looks for webpages, (/foo/bar/wandreilagh for the sake of this conversation), but rather in /foo/bar/wandreilagh/wp, I figured I could make a new directory wandreilagh/wp-2.0.6 in which to store the new version. Then I could overwrite the appropriate files from the old version onto the new, copy the old files to a directory called wp-2.0.5, and replace the old wp directory with a symbolic link pointing to the new wp-2.0.6 directory. If the site didn’t function for some reason, I could simply change the symlink to point to the old directory.

And lucky me, I was right. Got it on the first try. And I thought, in thanks for such a wonderful gift from the free software community, I might offer this as an upgrade process for others in a similar situation.