EXPLODEY BLOG!

Hello, readers. theantidj.net is back!

As some of you may have noticed, things haven’t been operating quite so smoothly here for a little while. Sometime around the middle of November, the database that runs the site went BOOM! Not being a database expert, and being unsure how to fix the problem, it took me a while to get around to getting things all back up and running. Fourtantely, I was able to finally get things back up and running.

So, what happened? Well, I had been using a WordPress plugin called Firestats. The purpose of this little plugin is to track your site statistics: hit counts, recent visitors, pages visited, recent referrers, popular search terms, and other things of that sort. Well, this program was a 0.9.8 beta release, but it had gone through several revisions, and looked to be ready for use. Too bad it wasn’t. After working fine for a few weeks, the program eventually managed to entirely mangle the WordPress database. As Jeremy said, “Now you’ve learned a valuable lesson about using beta release software.”

Once I finally decided to get started on fixing the problem, Jeremy pointed me to some docs on how to fix MySQL databases. The problem is that due to the way my hosting is set up, it didn’t seem like my account had permissions to run the proper programs on the database tables. After much stalling and frustration over a week or so about this, I finally looked around my directories and found a database dump from July, the last time I had upgraded WordPress.

After taking a dump of the current (screwed up) database, I nuked it, recreated it and imported the July dump. One of the tables in the July dump, the wp categories table, had become corrupted though. What I ended up doing is cutting the categories table from the recent dump, which I was pretty sure was ok, and pasting it over the table in the July dump. I then reimported the new spliced dump. It worked. I threw up my hands in victory and cheered so loud my undergrad-neighbors probably think I’m a crazy old man.1

The problem with using the July dump, obviously, is that it would only have posts up until that point. This was a total of about 12 posts. Since that time, I’ve made about 27 more. Well, forunately for me, all of the more recent posts were still in the corrupted db that I dumped, they just weren’t in the proper format any more. I’m now in the process of going through the dump file in a text editor and retrieving the posts ‘by hand’. I’m a little more than 1/3 of the way done with this process. It shouldn’t take me that much longer to get the rest in. I’ll have it done sometime tomorrow, I think.  The down side is that it looks like I have lost any of the comments that were  made after July.  While this is unfortunate, at least I was able to save the most of the other things from the corrupted database.
What does this mean for you? Well, nothing really.. unless you’re reading this through the Livejournal feed. If that’s the case, then you’re probably going to get my last 10 posts all at once on your friends page. I apologize for that, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a way around it. Hey, at least it will give you a refresher.
So, stay tuned for the complete restoration of theantidj.net along with the much awaited conclusion to the “To Ohio and Back” story… coming this weekend!

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1Who am I kidding? I’m pretty sure they thought I was a crazy old man already.

4 Responses to “EXPLODEY BLOG!”

  1. Omry Says:

    Hi,
    Sorry to hear that, are you sure the reason was FireStats?
    Please contact me on email, I`d like to know more about the problem.

  2. martygreene Says:

    I like he new layout much better than the old. I can read it without getting migraines. This is good.

    also, I misread your title as “explodey dog”

  3. theantidj.net » Blog Archive » To Ohio and Back, Part III Says:

    […] theantidj.net « To Ohio and Back, Part II EXPLODEY BLOG! »   […]

  4. Lucile Brabec Says:

    I need to check with you here, which isn’t something I usually do! I enjoy studying a post that may make individuals think. Also, thanks for allowing me to comment!

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