It’s amazing the things you have to learn and re-learn when it comes to moving.
I like to think of myself as a pretty tech savvy individual with an open mind towards new technologies, ways of doing things, etc. However, when it comes to specific things I’m in the dark and have never really felt the need/want to learn about them. What specific things you ask? How about something as simple as using terminal to manage my site.
Backstory: I’ve been wanting to upgrade the blog to WordPress 3.2.1 for awhile now. Why’s that? Mainly because I hate seeing the warning message every time I login to manage the site. The server I was on didn’t have the correct version of MySQL for the upgrade so I was stuck. In my time of need my amazing hosting provider David Fendley (@tricon) came through in a big way and offered to put me up on his own VPS. He woo’d me with big words that I didn’t quite understand (yet) and promises of super speed and shiny things so obviously I said yes, let’s make the move. So after a couple hours of backing stuff up, deleting stuff and a couple mistakes we got everything moved over.
The Problem: No FTP services. Everything was to be done via the command line within terminal, ssh-ing into the server and into my own little corner of it. Wait. What? Dave you’re killing me. I could have begged and took him up on his offer of installing some FTP services for a noob like me. Instead though I said no and got to learning about how in the world I’m going to work on anything.
The Solution: I turned to the web. No way? Seriously? After a couple hours of reading articles and doing a tutorial or two (ok, three) I felt confident enough that I could jump into the ssh/terminal pool and upgrade my version of WordPress to the most current, get rid of this stupid timthumb.php bug and start posting here once again. After wrestling for an hour or so last night I realized something was up. I was following the WordPress Automatic Update with SSH tutorial word for word and it wasn’t working. After talking with Dave we found a couple minor issues. One that he forgot to resolve (no worries man) and one we had to trouble shoot ourselves (a www vs. data issue). Once that was done however, things were back to normal and I was able to upgrade and here we are.
I could’ve taken the easy way out and had Dave do everything. I would’ve felt like a burden and would’ve felt a tad bit inferior knowing that I really should be looking this stuff up, learning it and owning it. I’m starting to do that. Dave says he’s giving me a crash course in something to do with terminal later on. By no means am I an expert in this stuff yet but it’s getting easier everyday and I’m learning new and cool things you can do that I wish I had known years ago.
Step outside your comfort zone. Get used to something you never use and who knows where it’ll lead you.
