Well I had a very scary experience over the last 24 hours. No, not going through the pain that is watching Arsenal scrape through a very tricky tie to go through to the Champions’ League Final in Paris on May 17 (any offers of tickets most welcome).
I went through an upgrade process to get MT, the platform that this site is hosted on, up to the latest version.
The notes on Sixapart’s website seemed very straightforward. I went through the process, skipping only one thing that I really really really should have done. That was, backing up my entire website. I backed up the SQL table that the data sits on, but not the full MT installation as it stood.
Anyway, all proceded fine, and there were no problems until I came to run the program. Instead of being faced with a login prompt, I got a Save or Open dialogue box. What?
Opening the text that was being returned I got things like:

Got an error: Unsupported driver MT::ObjectDriver::DBI::mysql: Bareword

Help!
Frantic Googling then followed, and I quickly found out that that the error was down to my host’s version of the Perl DBI module was too low for MT. Running mt-check.cgi verified this.
As a few other people have mentioned in their blogs and on various message boards, Sixapart really should have informed upgraders that this needed to be checked before they completed. Since my blog is served from a MySQL database, I really needed this module.
I now had a big problem. If I dropped back to a Berkley DB (as this blog once was), then I’d lose all my entries. At one stage in the process this looked like it was the case as I needed to log in with the installation defaults. Otherwise I could either drop back to a previous version of MT – not something I could do since I didn’t have the files, and on the MT website, earlier versions simply aren’t available to download (not to me anyway – I could get version 2.66 for some reason but that’s it).
My only hope was getting my hosting company to upgrade the module. I emailed them in hope more than anything, but just a few hours later I was told that I’d been moved to a more up to date server, and everything was now fine.
So can I just say thanks to Virtualnames who I must say are a very affordable and reliable hosting solution. The few problems I’ve ever had have been solved quickly and efficiently.
I had been contemplating a very painful long Bank Holiday Weekend rebuilding this site in something like WordPress. I didn’t really want to do this, although having helped a friend install it, I know that WordPress is set up with considerable ease.
At some point soon, I will update the look and feel of this site, and maybe I do need to switch away from MT. That’d be quite painful, particularly as it could mean breaking every Googled link to my pages unless I do something a bit clever. But all that’s for another day.
In the meantime, Arsenal’s in the European Cup Final!