It was obvious that the thing to do was to get my own hosted version of a Wordpress blog. I found a cheap host, registered a neat domain, downloaded the latest version of Wordpress, unzipped it, FTP’d the Wordpress files to the new host, created a database on the host, amended WP’s config file to point to the database server, database name, username and password, ran the install script and it was done. Well I did make one mistake in that the server was still pointing to localhost but apart from that the critter was up and live in an hour, and that’s a lot quicker than it used to take.

Of course I had to import the original Wordpress blogs into the new own-hosted version but at least I didn’t need to convert the files like I had to with Blogspot, but I did need to amend ‘class=alignright’ to ‘class=align-right’ for every entry in each of the exported xml files. Again I used Notepad and search and replace.

I’ve been testing some bulk upload process recently, though I’d been told that one of the versions I was regression testing did work in live (If it worked so well in live then why did you need to regression test it? Ed). There were 5 different data types to be uploaded and none of ‘em worked. Jeez, they didn’t even fail very well. Prior to the actual upload process the files were validated and the validation report was even written to the wrong folder.

We eventually did have a tiny bit of success with one of the data types, provided the data was squeeky clean and there wasn’t much of it. Took ages for even this success and I just put it down to some not too shoddy code that just happened to be lying around in the right place at the right time, got itself invoked, thrashed about a bit and by a miracle managed to update a couple of columns.

That was a few weeks ago and as a result several defects were raised just to get the software into some kind of shape that we could then have another bash at it. Needless to say the very experienced developer didn’t touch ‘em with a barge pole, and along with some words from one of the managers that it works in live, generated so much confusion that instead of testing the bulk upload process with small files and therefore where it was easy to determine some kind of expected results, this lot went big. Erm…lets try an 82mb file. That took 3 hours to validate and load, or fail and then they started looking at any data that had managed to claw its way onto the database. Due to all the time this took they were only getting around 2 runs a day. I left them to it.

Then last week, several weeks later, I was asked to test it again. None of the original defects had been closed, think they just respelt the word ‘defect’ as ‘defekt’ so they’d miss all the defect tracking report filters, they probably thought if you can’t see it then it’s not there or some other gonzoid attempt at logic. I started testing the same old bulk upload processes and waddayaknow…..just the same as before, full of bugs. I gave up after 2 days as there was no point as the software just didn’t work. I did raise eight quite major defects but they got ignored again. The developer just doesn’t fix bugs.

I think this might be the worlds slowest loading blog at the moment, database problem.