It's too damn hot.

We're still in full-on heatwave mode here, and though there are a few clouds in the sky, it remains brightly (and hotly) sunny. Well, at least this year nobody can complain about a nasty, cold grey summer!

In spite of the weekend's heat, we managed to have fun at a wedding party, relax, and get a new (and larger) rainwater tank installed at the back of the house. Now if it should rain, we'll get all the water that lands on half of the roof of the house (it's a saddle roof, so naturally you only get half the roof with one tank). I'm very excited to see how much water will come through into the tank from one "normal" rain. (I could do some maths and estimate how many square metres the roof has, and calculate from there, but... it's too damn hot for maths.)

I also spent some time during the weekend on website updating work*. You don't see anything of that yet, though - I have managed to clone the online shop to my local system, where it's now happily running on an installation of XAMPP. Installing that was the easiest part, though! It took a few tries and thus quite a bit of time to get everything running...

The first issues were with getting the backup extension for Joomla! to run. Akeeba backup and my hoster have sort of a strained relationship, it seems. After a while, that did work; so then I got to figure out how to get the copy to run locally. And then... several tries of updating from Joomla 2.5.x to 3.x. There's a number of steps that has to be taken in the correct sequence, and in the end I had to manually unpack the update package into the root directory and run the database fix. Main problem seems to have been template issues... but now it seems like it's running.

So I'm currently updating the shop system on the local copy, and then I will have to find a nice template for the new site. It will probably take a few months before I'm ready for the relaunch, but at least the most important step is done now - getting the upgrade to Joomla 3.x to work.


* I'm a firm believer in "never change a running system" and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Case in point? My graphics programme is 19 years old. But that's an old programme that works, and there are no internet security issues connected to it. In case of my website, support for Joomla 2.5 is running out, and that will in time leave the website open to attacks. And make it become more and more outdated, so... nothing left but to embrace the change. At least it's a nice reason to finally tackle the website and get it up to date again!