Isn’t free software a pain sometimes?
Whilst it’s great to have software that’s free and sometimes it’s quite excellent software one problem is that sometimes the business of upgrading it from one version to the next is a major pain.
For example, I wanted to do something really simple which was to move my blogs from one hosting service to another. It should have been a matter of backing up the Wordpress content on the old service, installing the software on the new one then restoring the backup. Well, that worked OK apart from the fact that I couldn’t amend any of the old entries and whenever I tried to post anything that contained a link it dropped me right out of the software.
There were several solutions proposed on the Wordpress support forum mainly involving the character set and its interaction with MySQL. None of them worked and it’s taken me over a month to find the real solution which involves adding a small htaccess file to the setup.
To be fair, paid for software often doesn’t have a sensible support option either and indeed I still await Microsoft to come up with a fix that’ll let me use Outlook 2003 on Vista. That’s probably the best example of really poor software testing that there’s been in recent times. Quite how they overlooked that Outlook 2003 just wouldn’t work on Vista is beyond me unless they just wanted to force everyone to upgrade to the pretty much incompatible Office 2007.
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Copyright © 2008 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.