Tuesday - January 11, 2011

updated?

I think I may have finally got the flag thing fixed on the comments. Too many people have written in, saying “Why does it show me in country ______ when I’m in country ____?”

That’s because the internet has grown by leaps and bounds since this version of the blog software was installed. IP addresses once associated with some country have been assigned to other countries. Thousands of new IP addresses have been created, and none of them were in the database tables for this blog.

It would cost me quite a bit of money, lots of time, and several ulcers to update the Expression Engine (EE) software to the current version. So I’m not going to do that. Too bad, as the latest version has the ability to just click a button and you can update all that IP and country information.

No, Drew had to do it the hard way. First I had to figure out what was wrong, then I had to find where everything was located - and the structure of this blog has dozens and dozens of folders on the server side, with thousands of files in them ... and that’s just the stuff that makes the blog run, not the posts, comments, and images. Then I had to get the update scripts and translate the current version of the database tables back into the early version that this blog software uses, then I had to modify all that data into flat SQL commands. This is an impressive amount of data, about 1500 pages worth in MS Word; around 50,000 records. Even editing the data caused Word to roll over and die several times, but I got it done.

Next I had to find the tables in the database out on the server. Um, this is getting scary. I haven’t messed about with databases in more than a decade. Truncating all the existing records while the tables were active? Crivens! But that’s what you have to do. And there is no such thing as an “un-truncate” function: once you dump the existing data it is gone. Forever. Then I had to paste in the new commands to enter each individual record. Hell, it took 3 minutes just for the paste command to go through. That’s a LOT of data. Then run it. And cross my fingers that the blog software is robust enough so that any “not found” returns from any database table queries that came back while the data updates were running didn’t cause the whole damn blog to crash. Yikes!

And it worked. WOO HOO!!!!

So now the “flags of the world” folder is updated with the latest images of all the world’s flags, the country code table has been brought up to speed, and the IP to Country table has 45,000 new entries, 790 pages worth of commands that look like

INSERT INTO exp_ip2nation (ip, country) VALUES(692551680, ‘ng’); (this just happens to be Nigeria, which now has listings for over 20 IPs. But no flag in the EE World_flags file! Niger neither.)

And that means the flag thing is just about fully modernized. “Just about” because the new table layout has more fields, which allows certain oddball parts of the world to come back with a proper hit on the tables. Places like “Palestine” which the raw data wanted to list as “occupied territory”. Oh the hell you say! I spent a gleeful 2 minutes changing “occupied territory” to “terrorists”, then realized that changing this aspect of the new format to work with the old format was too much of a pain. So I dumped that chunk of data. Which means that any comments or posts from these places may come back with an “unknown”, although my reading of the actual computer code ... which is not the best ... implies that the USA will be the default value. Not that we have any Paleoswinian members. I checked. Nipping off that part of the data cut 300 pages off the document and shortened things up by about 5000 records. So if you’re sending in a comment from the remote island of UngaBunga, gee, too bad, you may not get the proper flag displayed.

So lets see what happens. If it still is messed up, well, maybe I’ll fix it and maybe I won’t. This was a fair amount of work, and a bit of a scary thrill, but it’s not something I want to mess with more than once a year or so.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/11/2011 at 10:50 AM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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