Sorry for being off line, I don’t know how long its been maybe 2 weeks or more. I’ve just had a horrible time trying to get this site up and running again. Thanks to all of you who asked what was happening.
TECHNICAL NOTE
I think my hosting provider screwed up big time, and it made me realise when you pay peanuts…
I’m fairly sure the problem stems from a php upgrade to 4.40. I became aware of this when my moodle site (on a different domain but same hosting) broke. Looking at the moodle documentation it was traced to the Php upgrade. here.
As I haven’t posted in a while I didn’ know anything was wrong until people asked me if the blog was down. Nothing was happening on the site. There was no error – and its tricky trouble shooting without a specific error message. The hosting company said it was my responsibility and even refused to acknowledge that they had made any changes on the site. With poor response times I decided the time had come to find an alternative host. I’ve been wanting one with Cpanel for a while, and with the opportunity to use a UK based server came along I jumped at it. And WOW the backend admin pages are so much faster.
On the old site, I couldn’t even look at the MySql data because the phpMyAdmin seems to be broken. I exported the data to a .sql file but this had also been corrupted. The line breaks /carriage returns were wrong and there was single quotes around numbers but not around some text. Fortunately I had backed up 5 weeks ago. The handful of posts and comments since then I had to assembly individually from the sql backup, manually editing the lines of SQL inserts to get the single quotes right. That was surprisingly complicated because so many tables were affected.
Well the moral of this story to me is (nothing new here) make sure you back up. I hardly ever back up my web site. I was lucky that I had just done a wordpress upgrade. I have always trusted hosting companies not to mess up – you know they have back up proceedures. But when they screw up your site and won’t mend it you don’t have a leg to stand on. They don’t care about your £25 worth of business.
WORDPRESS UPGRADE
I am slightly worried as the backup tables that I reinstalled were from a previous version of WordPress. The only differences I noted were that some of the ID fields were big int(20) whereas the older ones were int(11). (Shouldn’t bother me) Also there were a whole load of new options in the options table. I plan on adding these manually. I guess I should run through an upgrade proceedure, but I haven’t really got time.
