Several miscellaneous items.

#1: I pressed the “upgrade” button with some hesitation and lots of anxiety.

Yes, I did go through the routine of backing up my SQL databases that work behind the scenes to track all the posts, comments, and other parts of the blog. But I’ve never had to restore from one of the backups because an upgrade failed. It means, at moments like this, you’ve just got to follow instructions carefully and trust the rest of the community.

In this case, the upgrade took longer than I anticipated and for several long seconds I thought it had failed. I was prepared for the worst, especially when a “fatal error” message appeared when I tried to access the site.

But then, somewhat miraculously, it all started working. And now seems to be running smoothly. Please let me know of any problems.

#2: I was surprised to dig down into the recently added mobile version and discover this message:

13% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.
You’ve had 232627 desktop hits and 37497 mobile hits in the last 3.3 weeks.

I didn’t expect to see the mobile traffic that robust.

Keep those iPhones coming this way!

#3: It’s campaign time again, and once again the question of political ads arises. Today, for some period of time, a banner ad promoting Cam Cavasso’s race for U.S. Senate was at the top of the page. No longer. I’m not interested in the limited space on this site to be taken up by candidates promoting views so far from my own.

When I posed the question about political ads early this year, there were a number of comments but no real consensus emerged.

I’ll just dangle the question out there again for anyone who wants to chime in.