Right before I went to bed Sunday night I installed the .94 beta 1 of the Lifestream plugin on this blog. Everything was looking good after the update so I decided to call it a night and pass out to sleep in on my day off. The idea of sitting around and doing nothing when I woke up sounded like heaven and nothing was going to get in my way of a day of relaxing so much it was going to be nearly a sin. Oh how I was mistaken!
When I woke up I suddenly had about 20 blog posts and due to Twitter Tools being installed about 20 Twitter updates as well. Being half asleep I quickly disabled Twitter Tools to at least alleviate that issue and started poking around. According to the forums for Lifestream this Twitter updating issue was a known bug in this release and a beta 2 was released overnight. Clearly an easy fix! I quickly overwrote the original beta with the new one and the Twitter updates stopped. Golden. I went on to update a few of my blogs and put a movie in to enjoy my day off.
When I came back though, nothing had updated. In fact none of the feeds even would update until I deleted and re-added them into the plugin (which of course makes it look a bit messy when everything is re-added.) However it looked as if things were working now, finally! So I went to re-add my last feed and- nothing. I cannot have it read the RSS from this blog. While I have generally had good luck on updating plugins this has reminded me to not get overly comfortable hitting that ‘automatic update’ button in Wordpress right as a plugin comes out. A few hours wasted and still not fully fixed.
Lifestream isn’t an overly intensive database plugin. All it does is show feeds of your choosing so it’s not that hard to re-setup and with how I use it, within a day or two it evens itself out on updates. However if it WAS something that would not be easy fix and breaks things it would have been a hassle.
Morals of the store:
1) Keep backups of everything, don’t just assume updates are a good thing
2) Don’t install betas of plugins on any of your main wordpress blogs that might break ‘things’ without trying them out first
(Due to being lazy, today’s image has bee shamelessly stolen from Illustration Info.)