I “Crashed” My Blogs

My head is still reeling from “crashing” both of my blogs late last week.

It all started, when I decided to add a third blog (more on that at a later date).

I signed on to my web hosting account, and filled out all of the information. No problem there. I added a third WordPress installation, and began configuring the pages. I was pretty excited.

Meanwhile, I noticed that this and my OM blog seemed rather “unstable”. My links weren’t working right. I would click on an article, and the page wouldn’t change. After researching, I tried changing my permalinks. I had beed using “/%postname%/”. When I changed them to “default”, my sites seemed to work okay.

I did a search, found where I was indexed, and entered my site from a Google indexed article. Problem. It was taking me to the home page-not the article that was referenced in the index.

I also noticed that my RSS feeds weren’t working correctly either.

And…..my AWStats and Webalizer, weren’t updated either. Hmmmmmm.

I quickly did a “save” on WordPress (“Manage” – “Export”), and saved a copy of my sites to my hard drive. I also did a “full home directory save” through my webhost account cpanel.

I wanted to do an experiment, so I uploaded (from my hard drive) my saved Observation Mountain data, to my third instance of WordPress. It worked. So, I knew, the information was “safe”. (I certainly didn’t want to lose 98 posts, and four months of work)

I then went to my cpanel, and deleted my original Observation Mountain WordPress install. I then reinstalled it, and uploaded my “saved” information, back into the site. It appreared to be working fine.

I tried to do the same thing with this blog’s saved information, but when I tried to open the saved information file, I got an error message – “undefined entry”…..

I knew better than to delete and reinstall this blog’s instance of WordPress and the database.

I started researching my FTP account, looking at all of the information that was in the “home directory”. I decided it was time to “clean up” some of the excess information (themes and plugins I had downloaded, and wasn’t using, etc…). I have an instance of WordPress installed on my hard drive, so I was comparing what was on my hard drive to what was listed on my ftp (under bloggingwithoutablog).

That’s when I made a HUGE mistake. I deleted my “wp-config,php” file. CRASH!!!!.

I called BlueHost, and luckily they had also done an update, and were able to restore my “home directory”. Whew! But, that also meant that my Observation Mountain blog would have to be retweaked. But…..that was a small price to pay. I at least was back up and running, on both of my blogs.

So…..there I was, back to reconfiguring everything. But….my RSS feeds still weren’t working. When I tried to validate the feed, I was getting an error of “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_wp_title_rss()in home/…../public html/bloggingwithoutablog/wp-includes/feed-rss2-comments.php on line 16”

I knew this meant something was wrong in my WordPress installation, but wasn’t sure what. Back to researching. I ended up on WordPress.org “FAQ”, and found that the error had to do with having an older version of WordPress installed. That sounded like an easy fix.

You guessed it…..it created another problem.

My blogs were working fine, links and RSS were working, but then I came to this blog, and was missing about 90% of the information. On my dashboard, all I was showing were my incoming links, but not posts or comments,,,,,Hmmmm.

At this point, I had to walk away from my computer.

Later, I called BlueHost, again, and they did another restore for me.

Now….everything appears to be O.K.

Lessons learned:

1) Keep current backups of your blog information on your hard drive.

2) Don’t ever delete wp-config.php

3) Make sure your webhost also keeps backups

4) If you’re going to try and correct problems with your blog, know you may “crash it”, so do your research first.

5) Keep smiling.  You just learned something new.

6) Keep a back up of your blog information on your hard drive…..so important, I have to repeat it.

I’ve also changed my themes to three column. My sidebar was getting pretty cluttered, so I’m finding this is working much better. Hopefully, it’s also easier for my readers to navigate.

Drop me a comment and tell me what you think.