If you’re going to update things, you might as well go the whole hog, eh?

In the last 24 hours here at Notes From The Nat, we’ve upgraded our database, our design, our server, our blogging software, our security, added some new features, changed URLs, and enjoyed a lot more Jolt Ultra (remember, kids, no more than 1.5 cans per day or your skin gets all itchy!) than most people are medically advised to.

Which is good. I mean, if you’re going to get your domain stolen, you might as well use it as motivation to make the site better, right? Tackle all the things on the to-do list in one fell swoop..

Benefits of the upgrades:

1. Faster page loads (about freaking time)
2. Cleaned up user and comments databases (so long, Viagraman, VioxxSeller12, and BigBoobs!)
3. Added a couple of nifty new features that you’ll dig a lot (for example, the funky image captions you can see on the last few posts)
4. Neat new design, complete with new C’s colours (yes, the buttons are pink - suck it up and be comfortable in your manliness)

Thankfully, because Wordpress is incredible content management software, not only were we able to make those changes without everything falling in on itself, not only were we able to run a search and replace on the database to change all mentions of the old URL to the new URL, but when we learned our database was actually sitting on a long-abandoned server, which we no longer had any back-end access to, and which should have, by rights, been deleted months ago (!), Wordpress was able to run a remote backup via the website admin page, thus saving three years of content from disappearing in a puff of logic.  Which it might yet still do, but at least if it does now, we have a copy of the dbase that we can reinstall and continue with.

It’s been a rough few days. Remind me never to travel to Armenia, at least not without a heavy bat in hand.

Things that got me through the last 24 hours:

1. The Juno Soundtrack. But only for a while - after three happy plays, it was dead to me.
2. Cloverfield. See it on the biggest screen you can find. It’s the monster movie that ends all monster movies.
3. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. "I’ll make you fun-sized!"

Welcome to Notes From The Nat, version 4.0.