Ysani’s screenshots now restored

Gallery reconstruction work continues on Anna Plays Skryim, and now all galleries for Ysani’s playthrough have been restored.

I currently have 576 total galleries (because BOY HOWDY do I have a lot of screenshots for Skyrim, as well as Morrowind, Oblivion, and ESO). Of these, 227 are now confirmed functional. (Alarrah’s galleries never broke as I had never converted hers over to the gallery type I lost access to, but I’m counting hers in this count.)

Which means my galleries currently stand at about 40 percent restored.

For the time being I’m putting a pause on playing anything else, while I focus on restoring all these galleries and then working on writing backlogged posts. So it’ll be probably at least another week or so before I put up new content. Stand by, y’all!

The next round of updates will start working on three playthroughs at once, Faanshi’s, Shenner’s, and Tembriel’s. Because I’m working my way forward in chronological order through all the galleries as previously created, just because that seems the most orderly way to me to proceed.

And oh yes, one more aspect of interest to this:

When I started converting the impacted galleries back to the gallery type that pulls directly out of the WordPress media library, I had a non-zero level of worry that I’d repro the same problem that broke the galleries back in the middle of Delga’s playthrough. That issue was basically causing older galleries to lose track of their assigned screenshots.

I was worried, once I made it into Delga’s screenshots, that I’d repro that same issue. But as of this post I’ve just finished Ysani’s restoration, and I’m now well past the point (in terms of number of active galleries) at which the previous issue showed up.

So so far it looks like I’ll no longer reproduce the issue, which is good. Though I’m still a little nervous about this because I don’t know what caused the issue in the first place. And as a person whose career is software testing, a problem I don’t have a root cause for always makes me nervous.

Any number of things could have fixed it, though. Because all of these apply since the original problem occurred:

• We had a change in internet provider
• Operating system updates on the server
• Multiple updates to WordPress
• Multiple updates to the FooGallery code
• I just installed a plugin called FileBird to help me manage the media library for this site, because I have a few thousand screenshots at this point and this makes for a very large and unwieldy library to manage without some help

Any one of these, or any combination of these, could have stabilized things enough that I no longer reproduce the earlier issue. What’ll also be interesting is whether a different issue I’ve been seeing on the site lately starts reproducing again–where galleries on older posts would render badly and I’d have to clear the site’s cached CSS data to make them work again.

Let’s hope things stay stable, anyway! Onward!