Stupidity

Remember: if you patch your blogging engine, make sure everything works properly before publishing it! And backup everything!

Ok, what I’m talking about here is this: as you may know I’m using .Text as my blog backend. Instead of using the pre-compiled binaries, I’m using the sources, which I compile directly. In fact, I do this in several stages:

1. I have a folder which contains the current sources synchronized with Vaultpub.
2. Another folder contains my developer version. This is the one I’m working with in VS.NET and doing my builds. Here I customize .Text to my needs. E.g. I added a calendar and the search. After synchronizing with the vault folder, I test it locally. Additionally, I update the database when required.
3. If the previous version works properly, I copy all files necessary for publishing to a third folder called live. This includes files such as the *.aspx and *.dll files. I change the home directory in the IIS administrator to this folder and test it again.
4. Last but not least, if the live version runs without issues, I upload the files to my web server.

Generally, this process works pretty well for me. Unfortunately, last month I haven’t tested properly, therefore a buggy version got uploaded to my server: Adding new entries was not possible. The worst thing is, I already changed my local sources to the .96 development version, which is not intended to go live.

Fortunately, I do backups of the sources whenever I update my web server. Though it took several days to find the time to investigate the bug, I finally managed to get my blog working again.

Long story short:

• Test your software before releasing it (which I didn’t)
• Backup your sources at release (which I did – fortunately)
• You can expect more posts coming on this blog than in the past

Thanks your patience