Shane Life

As someone who has been a loyal Sprint user for many years, I have been really looking forward to the release of the Samsung Instinct, a phone that many are calling one of the first decent competitors to the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out, I was jealous, but it was way too expensive to even consider. Tack that onto the fact that I am a member of Sprint’s Friends and Family plan, which makes things all the more inexpensive.

I’d go as far to say that I was excited for the release of the Instinct…

Until today.

Today, my favorite company in the world released the second-generation of their industry-changing device. There are haters that don’t want to admit Apple’s greatness, but those people are kidding themselves. This is a phone that has sold 6 million units in ONE YEAR.

To put that into perspective…even though it was released mid-way through the year, the iPhone was the 2nd most popular smartphone in the U.S. (3rd globally) and outsold all Windows Mobile devices combined.

The iPhone 3G isn’t really a massive update overall. However, the fact that it is adding 3G wireless connectivity and dropping its price by half (the 8GB iPhone went from $399 to $199), combined with the best operating system a phone has ever seen…well…needless to say, I’m reconsidering whether or not I want to stick with Sprint.

So here’s what I’m proposing…those of you that helped me raise money to buy a dairy cow back in January…I’m giving you another opportunity to give.

If you donate enough money for me to buy an iPhone, I’ll give up red meat for the rest of the year.

You read that right…I’ll give up red meat through the holidays if you help me buy an iPhone.

I think I am.

I have finally figured out what was wrong with my site.

(For those of you who do not understand, I’ll explain as best I can…for those who don’t care about technobabbly gobbldy-gook, feel free to not read…I won’t be offended, I promise).

OK, so I recently switched hosts from TextDrive to GoDaddy. There were a couple reasons why:

1. GoDaddy allows me to host unlimited domains
2. Price…GoDaddy is about half the price per month
3. I can manage everything in one place now, domains, hosting…the whole shebang.
4. Plus, GoDaddy’s support is very very good.

(This is not an incrimination of TextDrive. Their servers did, however, tend to be a little slow and SQL would occasional go down, but overall, they were pretty good.)

To backup everything required some serious learning on my part. I had no idea how SQL worked…all I knew was it was the database structure for all my data on my blog (and Jakes, but that’s beside the point). I figured out how to export all of my MySQL tables from TextDrive, backup all my presentation files, and move it all over.

Then came the hard part.

I quickly realized that one of the nice things about TextDrive is that they stay pretty current with the latest PHP, SQL, etc. languages. However, for a hosting behemoth like GoDaddy, they have to work with the lowest common denominator. So my SQL tables that were exported from TextDrive did not magically import into phpMyAdmin on GoDaddy’s servers like they were supposed to. I talked for a while on the phone with GoDaddy’s support and they were extremely helpful. I searched the internet and found countless workarounds, but I couldn’t get them to work for some reason.

Then I finally got the tables to import. I found a way to export my SQL tables from TextDrive into a format that earlier versions of mySQL would understand. This was a couple days ago. Then, when I went to post (I have a couple movie reviews to list…one on Little Miss Sunshine, one on Talledega Nights) and I got this:

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '0' for key 1]
INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’0′,’_pingme’,'1′)

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '0' for key 1]
INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’0′,’_encloseme’,'1′)

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in /wp-admin/post.php on line 60

Crap.

After some serious searching, I found the answer in the place I should have looked first, the glorious support forums of Wordpress. All I had to do was go into phpMyAdmin and edit the primary ID values of all my tables in my database to be set to “auto_increment”. Oh, is that all? Once I did that, everything began to work.
All is right with the world again.