My Uncle Ken was young (37 – September 11, 1961) when he died and since he was away from Winnipeg in Montreal I rarely saw him. I only remember bits and pieces here and there. We were on a family road trip and visited him at least once. His son Barry has a huge comic book collection with some first editions still in a plastic wrapper. My parents got to go to the Playboy Club. Does that mean my uncle was a member? Hmmm.

Last year there was a sailboat “incident” where the parts holding the centreboard in place were “lost”. Well, not exactly lost. I know where they are. They are in the bay in front of our cottage in about 40 feet of water, on the bottom.

Since my Fireball is from 1970, the parts I need are no longer available. However, through a couple of connections I located a great company that was able to recreate the parts from my diagrams and specifications.

Yesterday, the parts arrived. Very exciting

I won’t be able to install them in the boat until the May long weekend but I’m looking forward to at least one more season of sailing. Hopefully with some Grandkids!

I’ve been following the WordPress V7 development and using it on some of my other less important blog sites as an experiment, training and exploration of features.

Over the last few days I made the push to upgrade the Tempus Fugit blog, my original blog with a fair bit of history, to the V7 RC2 and a Full Site Editor (FSE) block template. The template I’ve chosen is the Twenty Twenty Five template that is currently the most current WordPress provided FSE block template.

The Bumps

The upgrade was not without a few bumps along the way. First up is a backup of everything, I’ve been burned before so now I’m a big backup believer. Also, my hosting service, BlueHost, offers a tool to create a staging site and also push the staging site back up to production. This seems like a good idea and it is also the 1st problem. I click the button to create the staging site and it gets an error .

After about 1hr with a support agent in a chat session I learned that because my blog was migrated from a different hosting service it doesn’t have the BlueHost plugin. One of the functions of this plugin is to manage the staging site. Who know? Not me.

Plugin installed and the staging site is created. Basically, it copies all the WP files to a new staging sub-directory (/blog/staging/3706), copies all the database tables to new tables with a “staging” prefix and then adjusts wpconfig to point to the new tables with the staging prefix in the same database.

Next up is to apply the new theme which is quite different from my last theme and then continue to make all sorts of adjustments to use templates, template parts etc. A big part of the work was recreating the menu template part. It’s working, but I’m not too happy with the look just yet. More work ahead.

A couple of big processes left. One works fine and the other, well that took a bit more effort.

WordPress V7 RC2

Moving from WP 6.9.x to WP 7 RC2 required installing the WordPress Beta Tester Plugin plugin and adjusting the settings to “bleeding edge” (yikes!) and pressing the “upgrade” button. Turning back is possible, but probably not that easy. The upgrade works and initial testing is good, nothing seems broken. Some more updating of the staging site and I’m ready to promote it to production.

Going Production

Promoting to production is as simple as a click of a button. The BlueHost plugin should copy all the WP files and SQL tables over the current production content. Sadly, this only sort of works. The file copy is successful but the SQL database import to production fails.

Some Googling w/AI and I learn there are several ways to do this process manually. The number one recommendation is to call Bluehost support since it’s their plugin that failed. So, I take the easier (?) way out and chat with support and they are fairly quick to resolve without too much wait time.

So, we’re up and running. I’m still not quite satisfied with the look and feel. There will be some more tweaking in the days ahead. But for now I’ve made the jump to the current WordPress world.

We’re up before 6am and Gail drives us to the airport. Checkin and breakfast at Tim’s and we’re on our way.

We layover in Calgary for a couple of hours and get some lunch, By 6pm we’re back in Winnipeg and Eric picks us up.

Home, Sweet, Home.

A great trip but glad to be back.

Later in the day, Gail, Zoe and I take a walk to a nearby park and beach. Which of course has boats.

Mount Newton Loop on AllTrails

However, as we drove up to the park the gate was still closed for the “winter” season and we’d have to park a fair distance away and it looked like a long way of up hill walking just to get to the start of the trail. Plan “B”.

We decide to return to home base and stop at another park we saw on the way up.

After the park walk we decide it’s time for some lunch and we head to Jack’s on the Water .

I’d wanted to hike Charlie’s Trail where there was a promise of seeing a waterfall, forest and of course more boats. Charlie’s Trail on AllTrails

However, this was a drive into Victoria proper and I was getting a bit tired from all the driving so we settled for a walk on the waterfront trail in Downtown Sidney for a few minutes and then back to home base.

We meet Pete Val, and Pete’s brother Len and wife Mary at the White Spot. After lunch and some chatting we all go down to the harbour.

And of course there were boats, even in the rain.

We part and head back to Gail’s for pizza and tv

Rained pretty much all day ?

A beach walk at Saanichton

Over to the Brentwood Bay resort and pub

Seafood chowder, first of the tri[p.

Of course some nice boats in the harbour.

One of the boats was for sale. 73’ at a price reduced $550,00. Seems reasonable

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