The old category structure I had was a really messy and nasty carryover back from when I used to maintain my journal and news separately on previous publishing platforms (Movable Type and homegrown), and from before tags existed on wordpress.  Ditched the blanket “News” and “Journal” top-level categories since they were a pointless distinction, making the topic subcategories into the new top-level categories, merging duplicates together (merging news->music and journal->music, etc).  Started using tags now for more specific keywords.

Removed a bunch of deprecated pages from the programming section. Namely all the script sections (all the bash scripts were deprecated in some way or another, the sed script was no longer necessary as most weblog software now has integrated import, the gwu java scripts are no longer necessary as I’m not at gw anymore – plus they also realized their system sucked and abandoned the scripts anyway, the runscripts were all old and unnecessary, and the ebuild was so old it was from back when gcc 3.4 was still experimental), the brainfuck page (the script actually didn’t really work well), and the ogg vorbis page (vorbis is a number of versions ahead now).

I use the “remember me” cookies on WordPress to keep myself logged in. So I didn’t realize that for a while (ever since upgrading to 2.3), anyone trying to view the front page got an error about a table (post2cat) not existing and couldn’t see anything. The category access plugin I was using to hide posts of a certain category was still using the database schema from earlier versions and referencing this table that didn’t exist. And of course, my account has access to all posts so the plugin wasn’t being invoked (therefore I could see everything with no problem).

The plugin has been updated and it should be fixed now for everyone. However, the plugin now has new issues with hiding posts (it doesn’t hide them completely, it only hides the title but still leaves the date/comments tag of posts in the listing). So the hidden posts show up, but I changed it to at least show a “Post Access Denied” message until the bug in the plugin is resolved. When going to a locked post it shows a blank page because the plugin is not parsing everything properly and sending some incorrect stuff (there’s some junk HTML as the title, for example). Technically still ok, I guess, since the post content is not revealed, but I don’t really have time to fix these issues myself.

Apologies for any issues.