Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

After some grueling times at work over the last several months, I have been needing to upgrade my blog for a long time. This weekend, I was finally able to do it.

My RSS feeds have been disabled for some time. CrystalTech, my web host, noticed a problem that I hadn't been able to get to. I wanted to fix it, but it seemed that an upgrade of BlogCFC was also necessary, from the 3.9 version I had been running to the new 5.5.002. I was really surprised that I couldn't find any documentation about upgrading the blog, and I suppose it would have been easier if I hadn't tried to do it all at once...

I had to make some custom changes to the code to make it work on my hosting account, since the "org" conflicted with another site on the server. The first time I tried to upload the code, I botched it up pretty good, but my second attempt (by separating the old blog from the new) was a success.

Then, there was the data transfer... not such a resounding success!

I needed to upgrade from Access (yes... I know... it was quick to get it up when I needed to!) to MySQL. The hosting problems were being caused by the Access... yes, again, I know. I'm not proud of sticking with Access that long. What can I say? I've been busy... and it wasn't a priority to upgrade.

It probably would have been easier to go with SQL Server, and I could have, but I figured MySQL was easier to isolate from my other apps. There is also something I need to do as a separate project with my SQL Server hosted database to upgrade, so I figured MySQL was a good alternative.

As is often the case when switching databases, there were issues with dates and boolean fields. I had to make custom updates to the records... one at a time. There are also new fields in the new version that didn't get turned on. It didn't automatically publish the entries. Once I figured that out, and published the old articles... everything came back.

It took a substantial portion of the weekend, but this post signifies that the transfer is now complete.

I still have to customize the look and feel... but I'll get to that later.