November 19, 2004
Technical Difficulties
The main page of the site was down most of today. Apologies for any inconvenience. Everything should be working again now, but let me know if you spot something askew.
The MySQL comment database somehow got corrupted, probably due to overzealous comment spammers. Since I had a blog backup from yesterday, as luck would have it, I tried to restore it. Those familiar with Movable Type will, of course, realize that this resulted in a bunch of duplicates. Argh! After trying to fix this for a while, I decided it was easiest to just manually go into MySQL and blow away everything (comments, entries, and trackback pings) and then restore the blog from the backup. Since the permanent links of each blog post is based on the title and not the entry ID number, this shouldn’t impact any of your bookmarks or links.
However, this is not true of the permalinks for comments, whose anchors were unfortunately based on the comment ID. I’ve now fixed them to be based on the comment’s “order number” within the post, which should remain the same the next time I have to restore. But if, for some reason, you had linked to or bookmarked a comment on the blog, you will have to update it. My apologies!
Let this be a reminder to any bloggers out there to back up your blog regularly! And try to design your templates to not rely on any internal database numbers like entry and comment IDs!
In other news, I’ve decided to make use of my LiveJournal account for personal crap (and where I now have an entry bitching about this incident). There’s an option to keep the Google spider and other robots out from LJ pages, so I figure it’s a more appropriate place to put stuff that nobody would ever care about except people who know me. Plus a place to do less edited and less organized — and hopefully more spontaneous — writing.
November 19, 2004 07:43 PM in Blogging | Permalink