Asian Addicts Anonymous

Aloha! And welcome to the next series of July Flashback Thursdays. I decided to wait until the first full week to continue these posts. We have now entered into 2012. It’s Asian Addicts Anonymous‘s third year of existence. I started off 2012 with the official decition to not have two separate sites for music and drama. Thus the sites I spent so long meticulously separating, I had to put back together. I even made the old site private while all this was going on. Oh, I played around with multi-site and separate installations on my self-hosted version, but in the end I just went with one main site with all the information. I’m horribly indecisive. I play around and around and around. After a while I did learn it was NOT good to play around on the real site until I had tested as much as I could on my Wamp backup and test site.

Oddly enough it was the anniversary month for ending my second year and staring my third that year I did probably one of the most stupidest things ever. I manually deleted all of the content from the asianaddictsannon.wordpress.com and migrated all the old posts in from my ancient blogspot account CNS Speak to live there. I also changed the url to nicileighyukari.wordpress.com. Doing this I did not realize just how many things would be broken. Changing the URL of the old site made all the old links to the media broken and I was too much of a WordPress and MySQL newbie to know that there was a simple and quick fix that would have made everything okay. I don’t remember when I discovered this database hack, but once I did it allowed me to fix things that I had broken. But this isn’t before I have spent hours reconfiguring and reuploading a lot of the media from my earliest posts because I just didn’t want to leave everything broken.

All the broken images made me decide to store as much offsite as compared to onsite to stop this problem from ever happening again. There are benefits to hosting offsite vs. onsite and vice versa. Ultimately it is actually better to have the images on your own server with hotlinking forbidden to ease up on bandwidth. Having the database call lots of external images can be problematic and bog down on load times considerably (as you can see with my MV gif posts). Bad idea.

Chani-chan was staying with me for an extended visit at this time and we decided to embark on doing joint posts. I would ultimately recap something and she would add in the commentary like cultural notes or comparisons to an original manga that a series was based on. I think we started Zettai Kareshi recaps this month (or the tail end of December). We still haven’t finished the drama, but we definitely will someday. It became fun to schedule virtual dates and then do our best to work out the finer points of a joint post. Doing all this actually sent me on a hunt for a coauthor plugin so that all authors of a post would be visible.

Ah, it was also I think during this year I also learned what happened when you update WordPress. All customizations that were not stored in a child CSS file or into a site specific plugin vanish into smoke. Or things stop working like they once did. You know, looking back, there really was so much I did not know that I’m not sure why I ever thought moving to self-hosted was a good idea. Now that I am more knowledgeable, I realize just how stupid and silly I was back then and how I really should have waited until I knew what I was doing. But life is a learning experience and you learn to roll with punches and deal with setbacks and I think taking on this task and making all these mistakes was definitely a good learning experience that got me delving more into the finer points of CMS, custom coding, and CSS.