I’ve been grinding my (false) teeth and pulling my hair for the last two days trying to figure out how a contact form I use could have gotten so broken. Ha!

It was the form and the naming conventions required for forms to correctly capture and parse the input. The downside? I feel like I wasted two days (even though I really didn’t). The upside? I learned a bit more about PHP. Even though it made my head hurt.

Well.  This wasn’t supposed to happen.  All I was doing was moving cathyheather.net to a new web server (my business server as it happens).  Of course, when does anything go according to plan?  What you need to understand is that all the posts, all the comments (including all the comment spam), all the internal messages from WordPress (the blog system I use), all of it is kept in a database.  If I had only thought about what I was doing…

So.  I exported the database, then couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t import to the database on the new server.  It was HUGE!  And about 97% was probably all comment spam and useless WordPress messages (that show up in the “dashboard” in the admin area.  I tried to wade through it to delete all the dreck, but there was just so much of it that it would have taken me a month to go through it all – and I just wanted to get on with the important part, the writing.  The only solution I could come up with was to simply start over.

Since I was starting over, I decided to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and get myself a new theme.  I hope you like the Empress’s new clothing.  [Aside: I should NOT be working on the computer when I have something in the oven…] I must say I am way impressed with the part you don’t see.  It makes me wish I had upgraded sooner. (And you all may be wishing I’d gotten a new theme…)

The only really good thing about having to start over is that I can repost some articles from the beginning.  I’ve been blogging since 2002 or 2003… That’s an eternity on the Internet!

Please bear with me through all of this.  A new webserver and a major website redesign – both the personal site and the blog – takes time and I’m still tweaking and updating.  Most of the tweaking is on the blog; the comments may look a little weird until I get the styles tweaked right.  On the personal site, it’s mostly updating, getting the gallery working and finishing the import of the wedding pages.

It has been fun though.