Chances are, there’s something you’re settling for right now. Something that annoys you periodically but you haven’t gotten around to dealing with it yet. We’ll tackle that problem in bite-sized steps over the coming weeks (and I’ll make the list of parts clickable as the series gets published), in this Heart-Centered Technology Tip 6-part series on upgrading:

• Part 1: Taking Stock (or: Meeting Your Fears Where They Are)
• Part 2: Laying the Foundation (or: Back Up Your Stuff)
• Part 3: Preparation (or: Getting Out Your Ingredients)
• Part 4: Documenting (or: Show Your Work)
• Part 5: Testing (or: Run That By Me Again)
• Part 6: Postmortem (or: Monday Morning Quarterbacking)

So when I say “upgrading,” you can think of software, hardware, services, or pretty much anything. I’ll be using my experience updgrading this very blog as an example, but you can substitute your specific technological annoyance.

You did it!

You prepared, you kept careful track while you upgraded, and you tested everything when you were done. Yay! Now you can forget about it until the next time you have to upgrade, right?

Well, yes, you could perfectly well do that. You did a great job with your upgrade and you’re technically finished. But I want to suggest one more step that may seem like drudgery now, but will pay off bigtime later.

The postgame analysis

This is where you ask yourself how you feel about the whole process, and really notice the answer(s).

There may be obvious lessons that show up immediately, like “next time I’ll make sure I have an AC adapter with the right size plug” or “I’ll look up the hours that Tech Support is open before I start, so I don’t call them at 4:30 on Friday only to find that they’ve gone home for the entire weekend.”

But even if you don’t have any of these hit-you-upside-the-head “Oh, I should’ve…” moments (and yay for you if you don’t!), you can still ask yourself where you felt least comfortable, if there was anything that would have helped make it easy and simple and even pleasant.

It’s OK to live in a dreamworld here for a moment.

The thing that would help the process feel safe for you may not feel possible in the real world, but you are still allowed to notice it and wish for it.

For instance: You might wish the manufacturer’s instructions were written better. You might wish the dialog boxes during the upgrade process were easier to read or explained your choices more clearly. You may wish there were a reset button so you could cancel and start over when you got confused.

These may seem like things you have no control over. And it’s OK to be annoyed by stuff like this. (Whine! Rant!)

And then ask yourself if there’s anything that you do in fact have control over.

If you found the instructions onscreen hard to read, it may be possible to adjust the font size of your computer — if that in itself doesn’t stress you out (and you have until your next upgrade to figure it out). You could, if you feel really brave, write to the manufacturer and tell them what you found confusing in the instructions. (You totally don’t have to, though.)

Most importantly, you can make notes to yourself (on the same page or in the same file as your upgrade log, described in Part 4) about what you might want to remember next time, any tips or tricks you got from tech support or from friends, and how you felt about the process.

Including your elation at your own success. Because next time you go through this process, you’ll not only have helpful reminders from yourself, you’ll have proof that you’ve done it before and it worked and you felt good after it was over.

And if you realized that you really don’t want to do this again?

That’s a voice I hear loud and clear in my head as I’m writing this post. “What if the main thing I learned is that it takes up way too much of my time and energy to prepare, do the upgrade, and do the after-analysis? What if I discover that I really just want someone else to do it for me?”

Yes!

Great information!

And I promise that there are people who can do this stuff for you. Whatever it is. Whether it’s setting up a new computer, installing a word processor, upgrading your WordPress installation, migrating your Blogger blog to WordPress, or… pretty much anything. (Those two links are to Johnny B. Truant’s top-notch professional services.)

There are people out there who are experts at all the things you hate.

And if the pain of do-it-yourself upgrading is more than the pain of paying someone to do it for you (and only you can make this determination, because it’s your pain we’re talking about here), then by all means, get some professional help!

Either way, you win.

Until next week,

Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

Chances are, there’s something you’re settling for right now. Something that annoys you periodically but you haven’t gotten around to dealing with it yet. We’ll tackle that problem in bite-sized steps over the coming weeks (and I’ll make the list of parts clickable as the series gets published), in this Heart-Centered Technology Tip 6-part series on upgrading:

• Part 1: Taking Stock (or: Meeting Your Fears Where They Are)
• Part 2: Laying the Foundation (or: Back Up Your Stuff)
• Part 3: Preparation (or: Getting Out Your Ingredients)
• Part 4: Documenting (or: Show Your Work)
• Part 5: Testing (or: Run That By Me Again)
• Part 6: Postmortem (or: Monday Morning Quarterbacking)

So when I say “upgrading,” you can think of software, hardware, services, or pretty much anything. I’ll be using my experience updgrading this very blog as an example, but you can substitute your specific technological annoyance.

You’re done. Now what?

Yep, the first three posts in this series covered preparation, the fourth talked about what you need to do during the upgrade process, and now your upgrade is complete. You can walk away satisfied, right?

Wait, not so fast.

If you made it through the upgrade and got to the “success” page or dialog box or whatever, that’s fantastic. And you can totally breathe a sigh of relief, and allow yourself to celebrate.

You bet I celebrated after my successful upgrade from WordPress 2.6 to 2.8. I’d done all the prep work. I was a bit obsessive about backing up and making sure I had copies of every post, every piece of HTML, and every image on the entire blog in multiple places.

And when I hit the button to begin the upgrade process, my heart was beating a tad too fast. Terrifying scenarios of crashing blogs danced through my head. I imagined my panicked IM to my tech-expert friend: “Um, are you still awake? Because my entire online empire just vanished.”

(Yes, I did wait until late on a Saturday night to actually do the upgrade. It was a conscious choice that I made to help me meet my fears where they were, and create my own safety during the process.)

Turns out there were no panicked IMs, no flashing error messages. The whole thing happened in about 15 minutes, nothing crashed, and everything looked normal post-upgrade. I celebrated by going straight to bed and sleeping like a baby all night.

Bonus tip for WordPress upgrades (versions 2.6 and previous):

By the way, if you are still running WordPress 2.6 and you don’t want to go through the six-part upgrade process I’ve been describing, make it easy on yourself and just hire Johnny to do it. Ridiculously simple and won’t break your bank. If you are using any version of WordPress that’s 2.7 or later, you won’t need to hire anybody because 2.7 introduced the one-click upgrade, which truly is one-click.

So, seriously. Congratulations on your upgrade. Have a piece of chocolate… on The Good China. I’ll wait.

Are you back? Good.

Because now we get to the first post-upgrade to-do item:

Test everything.

I waited until Sunday morning to do most of my testing, once I’d had a good night’s sleep and the euphoria of not destroying the website had settled into a buzz of contentment that I now had the nifty 2.8 dashboard to play with.

Depending on what you’re upgrading and how serious an overhaul it is, you may be able to do a few quick tests immediately post-upgrade, or you may need to check a bunch of stuff.

Just for fun, here’s a reminder of what can happen if you overlook this testing phase:

This is a photo I took at a car dealership near where I live. In fact, this sight inspired this whole 6-part series. It just blossomed from a marketing blooper into the masterpiece you’re reading now. And in case you’re wondering, it is not physically possible for the letters to line up correctly to spell SALE no matter which direction you’re coming from to approach the dealership.

Nope, someone went out there and propped up four letters to let everyone know there was a big ELAS going on. Oops. (To their credit, the letters got fixed within a day or so… I drove past later that week and sighed with relief.)

I don’t know what was going on in their head when they did it. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that no one bothered to go look at the marketing message from across the street… or even out front, just to see what potential customers would see as they were driving by.

So this is a lesson that can be applied to upgrading, but it’s also a piece of marketing advice. Probably another whole post there, about testing your own purchase process, signing up for your own email newsletter, and doing a drive-by analysis of your own website.

But for now, let’s talk about what you can test post-upgrade.

Post-upgrade testing

For software, you probably want to do things like:

• Launch the program.
• Launch the program in multiple ways (from a desktop shortcut, from your Dock if you have a Mac, by clicking a document instead of the program icon, by opening an email attachment).
• Save a test file (and make sure you can reopen it, that you know where it’s being saved, and that it saves with the correct extension and name).
• Make sure you can still find and do all the things you already knew how to do in the previous version (this can be annoying if menu items have been moved around, and you want to find out where your favorite feature went before you need it).
• Give yourself permission to try some of the fancy new features (that’s part of why you upgraded in the first place, right? Have some fun with it!).

For my WordPress upgrade, I did a whole lot of surfing this site, making sure old links worked, searching for nonexistent pages to see if the correct error message came up, scrolling to make sure the sidebars still had all the right stuff, and the like. I explored the new navigation menus, made sure I knew exactly where to click to do my most frequent actions (like, say, writing a post or editing the sidebar), and bounced back and forth between my dashboard and the home page countless times.

It was kind of fun because it was such a relief to see everything working correctly. And for the same reason, it wasn’t too time-consuming. Of course, if I’d found errors and formatting glitches and gremlins, I might have been seriously bummed, but I had my handy log of everything I did during the upgrade (see Part 4) and I had my myriad backup files (see Part 2) in case anything was wonky.

And nothing seriously went wrong. And all the prep work I’d done was seriously worth it. And now my little corner of the blogosphere is fully up-to-date.

Goodness, I see an alert at the top of my WordPress dashboard that tells me the latest and greatest WordPress (2.8.2) is available. I’m going to go hit the one-click upgrade button and revel in the fact that the days of difficult WP upgrades are (hopefully) over.

Remember, go ask Johnny if you need help getting out of WordPress 2.6.

Otherwise, rock on, because my final upgrade post is only a week away!

Until next week,

Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

Chances are, there’s something you’re settling for right now. Something that annoys you periodically but you haven’t gotten around to dealing with it yet. We’ll tackle that problem in bite-sized steps over the coming weeks (and I’ll make the list of parts clickable as the series gets published), in this Heart-Centered Technology Tip 6-part series on upgrading:

• Part 1: Taking Stock (or: Meeting Your Fears Where They Are)
• Part 2: Laying the Foundation (or: Back Up Your Stuff)
• Part 3: Preparation (or: Getting Out Your Ingredients)
• Part 4: Documenting (or: Show Your Work)
• Part 5: Testing (or: Run That By Me Again)
• Part 6: Postmortem (or: Monday Morning Quarterbacking)

So when I say “upgrading,” you can think of software, hardware, services, or pretty much anything. I’ll be using my experience updgrading this very blog as an example, but you can substitute your specific technological annoyance.

Can we get started already?

OK, we’ve done three installments on preparation for the upgrade. Now we’re ready to begin the Real Actual Upgrade process. You’ve examined your worries and fears, you’ve backed up your files, and you’ve got all your equipment, instructions, and adequate time, right?

Good! Now there’s just one simple rule to follow as your upgrade proceeds:

Write everything down.

Yep, everything. Start with the time you’re beginning the upgrade. Just pull out a sheet of paper and write “2:13pm: Opened installer” or your equivalent. Then keep a detailed log as you proceed through the installation instructions.

Yes, it may seem kind of tedious. You can safely use shorthand like “followed installation instructions steps 2 through 6″ if the steps proceed normally and fairly quickly.

Why bother doing this? In a nutshell, it will help tremendously if anything does go wrong or if you have problems post-upgrade. It’s always better to have more information if you have to call tech support or describe your problem to a helpful friend. You want to be able to say something like “I got as far as step 5, and then as soon as I pressed the “continue” button I got error 4456″ instead of “the installation froze in the middle and I can’t use my computer.”

If your upgrade/installation proceeds normally and you don’t experience any problems, you’ll have a sheet of scribbled notes and you may have spent a little extra time on the process. I don’t think that’s wasted time or effort at all, even if feels tedious and cumbersome. Better to use a sheet of paper and an extra half-hour than to get stuck in the middle somewhere and have tech support tell you to reboot.

Here are some things you want to include in your written log:

• Time you started. Also consider noting the time when you move from step to step, if the steps take long enough.
• Any choices you have to make. This might include the folder or directory where something is installed, usernames and passwords, and configuration options. Any time you have to make a choice before continuing, write down what you chose. You may need to refer to your configuration options later in the installation or when you’re working post-upgrade, so it’s really convenient to have a record of these.
• Any time you deviate from the default. So if you get to a given step and there’s a checked checkbox for “automatically install icons on your desktop” and you uncheck it, just make a quick note of it. Ditto if there are unchecked checkboxes and you check them, or if you select different options from the “standard” choices.
• When something unexpected happens. If a step takes longer than you think it should, make a note. If you have to go through more steps than you expected, write this down.If you didn’t realize you were going to need an XYZ cable or a blank CD or a wifi connection…write it down.
• Any error or warning messages you get. This is really important: Write down the exact wording of the message, including any bizarre-looking error codes. Write down exactly what happened just before the error popped up (did it happen when you clicked a button onscreen? When you pressed return? When your computer searched for five minutes and couldn’t find something?). Write down what you did next (did you click OK? Did you click Try Again? Did you reboot your computer? Did you call tech support?).
• The results of your upgrade process. Ideally, this will be something like “Installation completed successfully at 2:26pm. Computer required me to restart. Everything works as expected.” I’ll go into much more detail in next week’s post about testing, but for now make sure you’ve noted the end of the process.

Just look how far we’ve come! We spent three weeks preparing, and now you’ve upgraded and everything’s great, right? Does that feel a bit anticlimactic? That’s actually what you want with a successful upgrade, believe it or not. But I’ve got two post-upgrade installments coming, to help you ease into your new tools/toys and make the next upgrade even smoother.

Until next week,

Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

Chances are, there’s something you’re settling for right now. Something that annoys you periodically but you haven’t gotten around to dealing with it yet. We’ll tackle that problem in bite-sized steps over the coming weeks (and I’ll make the list of parts clickable as the series gets published), in this Heart-Centered Technology Tip 6-part series on upgrading:

• Part 1: Taking Stock (or: Meeting Your Fears Where They Are)
• Part 2: Laying the Foundation (or: Back Up Your Stuff)
• Part 3: Preparation (or: Getting Out Your Ingredients)
• Part 4: Documenting (or: Show Your Work)
• Part 5: Testing (or: Run That By Me Again)
• Part 6: Postmortem (or: Monday Morning Quarterbacking)

So when I say “upgrading,” you can think of software, hardware, services, or pretty much anything. I’ll be using my experience updgrading this very blog as an example, but you can substitute your specific technological annoyance.

I’ve already talked about getting psychologically ready to upgrade (part 1), and the very important step of creating a backup (part 2). We have one more pre-upgrade step before we can actually get started:

Getting technologically ready to upgrade

Think of your upgrade process as cooking. You’ve got some ingredients (new software or hardware or whatever), you’ve got a recipe (the upgrade instructions), and you’ve got the dream of the delectable finished dish (your post-upgrade success).

Have you ever started a new recipe and then discovered, halfway through, that you needed to run to the store for a missing ingredient? Or, even worse, discovered that you were out of a crucial ingredient at a time-sensitive stage in the recipe (you need to add the garlic in exactly three minutes, and you look in the fridge and you’re out of garlic!)?

Ouch! Recipe ruined.

Use the cooking metaphor as your guide, and read the recipe first, from beginning to end. Make sure you understand the steps, the terms, and what you should expect at each stage.

If anything is unclear, now is the time to ask for help, not when you’re halfway through an upgrade and you’re suddenly not sure if clicking “OK” will save your bacon or erase your hard drive. You can Google your questions, look on the company’s website for a FAQ or a forum, or contact them directly for tech support (I’ll bet that they would much rather answer a simple question from you now than try to talk you through an upgrade when you’re tense and upset).

Next, assemble your tools and ingredients. If you need a cable, make sure you have the right cable. Check the operating system requirements and make sure your computer can handle the upgrade. If you need to unplug and plug in peripherals, pull your power strip away from the wall so you don’t have to crawl under the desk four times in a row (I’ve done this. It’s a complete pain.).

Tip: Print the instructions (if you don’t have a paper manual or instructions to begin with). You definitely want to do this if you’ll be restarting your computer during the upgrade, but even if you’re not restarting, switching back and forth from the upgrade screen to the instruction document may be a little nerve-wracking. It can help to have ready visual access to your instructions.

Take as much time as you need for this preparation process.

Those chefs on the Food Network make everything look easy, because they have all these little bowls of pre-minced garlic, pre-sliced chicken, and pre-measured spices lined up next to a clean pan with exactly the right amount of olive oil waiting to be added. But even home cooks, without the benefit of sous-chefs or the magic of TV editing, know that assembling their ingredients beforehand makes the final steps go easier. The French gave us a term for the tray of pre-assembled ready-to-cook ingredients: Mise-en-place. It means “(everything is) put in its place.”

When you’re working on a technology recipe, give yourself the boost (and, to be honest, the oh-so-French flair) of preparing a mise-en-place with your instructions, equipment, and everything you need to not only start but complete the whole process.

Now, block out some time (more than you think you’ll need), and get ready to begin. Next week we’ll plunge into the upgrade process itself, and talk about what you need to do during this process to help ensure success at the end (and good tech support if you should need it).

Until next week,

Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator