BlogIt’s WP-Day!
It’s technically not midnight on the west coast yet, but we’re starting the migration to WordPress…….. now. The migration is expected to be completed sometime Saturday, and we will re-open the news section of PhoneNews.com then.
Stay tuned to this blog post as I’ll be keeping updates with the transition. I will say right now that we won’t be launching with our new look… we’ll be using the theme you’re seeing right now, until about next Wednesday, when the design team completes the coding on it.
1/5/08
8:40 AM: We’re back online. There’s still a lot of work left, but 24 hours of zero electricity hasn’t stopped the migration from being a success, and completed on time. We continue to be impressed with the power-and-simplicity that WordPress delivers, so enjoy, we’ll be back to full reporting capacity next week (that’s Monday, for those of you in Reston, VA).
7:40 AM: WordPress installed. Content migrated. We’ll have the site open shortly (probably within an hour), though much work remains to be done…
7:05 AM: The Joomla content management system has been removed from PhoneNews.com. Joomla, you’re fired!
6:20 AM: Starbucks has opened. Batteries are charging. Wi-Fi on. Back to work.
2:00 AM: Unfortunately, everywhere there is power right now… I can’t get access to an outlet. Gas is starting to run out in the city, many stations are already completely out. After an hour on hold, I finally did get an update on the power situation, which isn’t very good. We’re not the highest-priority outage, and they can’t fix it until they get a tree clearing crew out there, which probably won’t happen until the sun is up.
The “late tomorrow” estimate I quoted earlier was supposed to be a worst-case estimate, well, now it’s the middle of the road estimate. As more places open up around 6 AM, I will try to find some corner of some diner to get back to work… sorry folks.
12:30 AM: I’m off to attempt to get some better connectivity. I really apologize for the delays folks, we were aware a storm system was headed for California, but power outages and the severity of the storm were not expected at this level (in our area, at least) when we started the migration on the first.
1/4/08
5:15 PM: Sending this update in from my iPhone. Power is still down here, and current estimates place restoration as far as another 24 hours away. I’ll keep you updated when things improve.
10:30 AM: D’oh. Storm systems currently hitting California have taken out power at PhoneNews.com’s southern and northern commands. I’m sending this in from my Sprint Mobile Broadband card. Unfortunately, the site is still in too fragile of a state to keep editing it while not on a dedicated line. So, we have to wait for the power to come back up to make real changes.
The power went out over three hours ago, and we still do not have an ETA from the power company as to when it will be restored.
With another storm coming in tomorrow, right after this one fully passes, things aren’t looking too good for us to meet the self-imposed deadline of midnight. But, if the power comes back on, we’ll get to work right away.
1:40 AM: Apologies for the lack of progress updates. And for referring to this as 2007 (bad habit around the new year). In the middle of the transition, I looked around the office, and decided it was time to reorganize for the year. Mostly because I realized that, if this was the only time until June to make this migration… it probably would be the only time until June to seriously re-arrange things.
Most of that is done, so we’ll get back to the migrating. We’ll have everything on WordPress in a few hours, leaving the remainder of the day for fine tuning.
1/3/08
3:50 PM: Spam bots are hammering the Phone Encyclopedia right now, we’ll be back to migrating as soon as we handle the infux of spam that made it through the net.
5:51 AM: Sandbox is online. Joomla removal will begin shortly.
2:51 AM: Sandbox is being constructed… this may take awhile. Off for food (Note to self: Find some way to have a good reason to raid Google’s kitchen at 3 AM… without getting a job there).
1:17 AM: Backup taking a bit longer than expected (we are hitting up to that magical 4 GB realm for the archive… good thing we’re miles away from anything FAT32). The offline page is now up on the home page… so hello to all of you that have ignored the blog until now!
12:21 AM: Download’s about half way done… we’ll be putting up the offline note on the home page in a few minutes.
1/2/08
10:37 PM: We’ve started a full backup, and once that’s done, we’ll download off-site, and validate it. We’ll also be taking the latest backup and putting it on a sandbox for comparison during the changeover.
