I decided I should upgrade Tropical Blogging to the new version. Of course, I made sure I had backups of all the files, and a backup of the MySQL database, before doing anything.

I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, de-activated all my plugins per the instructions, followed the instructions to upload the files, and then followed the instructions to update the database. (Which basically consisted of clicking an “Update” button.)

All my posts were still there. But all the categories were missing! No, actually, they weren’t missing — they had numbers but no category names, and none of the posts were assigned to any categories.

I found a couple of posts on the WordPress support forum about this, but they weren’t any real help. The database structure had changed — there was no longer a “categories” table in the database. There’s a “category-to-tag” converter and a “tag-to-category” converter in the admin area, and I tried both, but neither one did anything.

I ended up manually re-creating each category, then manually assigning each post to appropriate categories. I almost just went back to my old WordPress installation, but I have this weird obsessions where once I start down a road I really hate to give up and go back.

I also discovered that my theme doesn’t work with this new version. It appears to work, initially — the home page of the blog loads just fine. But clicking any of the posts to “read more” results in an error. So I have to use a different theme, or get into troubleshooting that theme. Bah!

I’d like to update my clients’ WordPress-based blogs, but I sure don’t have time to muck around doing crap like that. For now I’ll take a pass. I hope WordPress addresses this issue, or those blogs will just forever have to be stuck on whatever version they’re currently runninng.

The result is the Orangutan Island Forum. Almost immediately, the site jumped to 3rd place in Google for a search on Orangutan Island — just behind the official Animal Planet pages. I was pleasantly surprised when people started registering on the forum and talking about the show, and I’m having fun participating in the discussions and learning the ins and outs of the phpBB software.

But I wasn’t sure about my choice of forum software. I didn’t want to pay for the well-loved and very robust vBulletin — after all, this whole thing was just a whim, and my budget was non-existent. I knew that phpBB is a well-known and popular open source forum package, but development is in flux just now: They’re working on getting phpBB 3 into final release, and I dithered about whether I should install the “stable” version 2 or the “unstable” RC (release candidate) version 3. I went with version 2 and I’ve been second-guessing my choice every day.

Then I got to looking more deeply into forum packages, and I discovered the Simple Machines Forum — not open source in the conventional sense, but free to use, so long as you keep the copyright in place and follow a few other minimal restrictions. From everything I read about it, SMF sounded robust and full featured, and I wanted to try it out.

I started casting about for another forum idea, looking for some reason to set up another forum somewhere so that I could give SMF a whirl, and I had a brainstorm: I use a software program called Studiometry for my client and project management and invoicing. The company that makes Studiometry used to have a very useful user forum, but they shut it down sometime back with no explanation.

So I registered studiometryforum.com and set up the Studiometry Forum.

The SMF software was reasonably easy to install, although it was more difficult than I had hoped to find a theme that suited me. But everything worked as advertised out of the box (which isn’t always the case), and the theme I finally settled on was easy to install. I wanted to make a few minor changes to the html/css of that skin, and that was also easy.

I have only a handful of users so far on this new forum, but I’m hopeful it will gain traction and attract the Studiometry users who used to frequent the official Studiometry forums.

And even if it doesn’t, I gained valuable experience learning my way around a fine forum software package. It’s always beneficial to know what’s available and how easy or difficult it is to install and customize.

Adobe’s 800-lb. gorilla, Photoshop, is of course the mother of all graphics programs. Vector graphics, raster images, photos, scanning, touching up, resizing, cropping, retouching, batch processing. Every version of Photoshop is better than the last.

But everyone knows about Photoshop, whether they use it or not. What about all those little programs and utilities that not everyone knows about?

Transmit, from the good folks at Panic, is my FTP program of choice. I was a long-time Fetch user, and never thought I’d see any reason to move away from Fetch, but Transmit hooked me a couple of years ago, and it’s done nothing but improve since then. Transmit has almost reached the point where the only way it could get more convenient to use would be if I could merely think a file to the remote server.

When I’m working in my text editor of choice (TextMate), I hit cmd-S for save, then cmd-+ to upload the file. (That’s my own custom keyboard shortcut, by the way. I didn’t find Transmit’s default keyboard shortcut convenient, so I changed it.) Anyway, cmd-+ and off the file goes. TextMate hooks into Transmit via some technology that I don’t understand, and Transmit logs into the appropriate remote server, cd’s into the appropriate directory, and uploads the file. I don’t have to switch programs. I don’t have to drill down through the directory path. Likewise, I can drag a file from the Finder onto Transmit’s icon in my dock, or I can drag the titlebar icon from any open document onto the Transmit dock icon, and it gets sent off to the right place. Folks, FTP’ing can’t get any easier than this.

More on TextMate another time. I love this little program, too.

Lately I’ve been using OmniOutliner to keep track of things. I keep one OO file that serves as my master to-do list, subcategorized by Client and Project, with deadlines and completion dates noted, and notes and files attached where needed. Another OO file serves as my master changelog, where I make a quick note whenever I make any change to any site. Many is the time I’ve needed to know, exactly when did we launch that site? or, When did I install that new script? or, When did I make those changes the client requested? OO is helping me track all of that.

And don’t get me started on StickyBrain. I think the Chronos people have discontinued development, or are planning to, but as long as my current version of StickyBrain keeps working, I’ll keep on using it for my dozens (nay, hundreds) of random notes and bits of data. It’s Sticky Notes on steroids, is what it is. I must have more than 3 dozen categories of stickies: snippets of php code, samples of complex MySQL queries, unix commands that I have trouble remembering, notes about my dedicated server, bits of css and html, boilerplate paragraphs for letters, e-mails and contracts — it’s in there. It’s searchable (and better yet, findable). It backs itself up. It keeps track of all those little things that my RAM-starved brain can’t.

I have plenty of software designed to do things. The software that helps me organize and keep track of the things I do, and makes doing those things easier and faster, is what wins my heart in the software wars.