Or the day I killed the Crabitat.
For the past two weeks or so I have been trying to get the original bluecrabboulevard.com domain back up after the hosting company took it down. I can’t really blame them, the site was having real issues with slow SQL queries. The lags became so bad that it was impacting the entire server. I was able to get the .net domain up and running as a backup. Then I tried to find someone to fix the website.
This turned out to be more than a bit difficult.
I still have not received replies to emails I sent to several website designers who advertise the ability to handle any problems with websites. One I did hear back from offered to build me a nice, custom website for the better part of a grand. Without being sure they could repair the old site.
Regular readers know I am a bit of a geek. Okay, more than a bit. But I’m a hardware geek or a software user geek. I am not a programmer. The most formal software training I have ever had was in Fortran 77. I do not know anything about PHP and my knowledge of SQL is all more than 20 years out of date. And that was a one week course.
So, yesterday, I finally reached the point where I had to decide what to do absent any expert help. I had to kill the Crabitat. In other words, completely erase the existing WordPress installation and the database. Three years of posts, comments, pictures, etc., etc.
I talked it over with tech support at the hosting company (and they have generally been great throughout all this mess). They advised backing up everything, especially the irreplaceable image files.
So I downloaded the image files to my computer, logging the directories they had been placed into so they could be reloaded. After I had everything I thought I needed, I flipped the switch, so to speak, and deleted the entire Crabitat.
Then I reinstalled WordPress into the newly empty space and the hosting company helped migrate the database back from the backup domain. After that reloaded, I loaded the image files back into where they had been before the euthanasia, flipped the switch again and went live with the “new” website.
And have since discovered that I missed one (or more) files in my backup efforts. Some images are gone. If I’m lucky, I have those files in a huge .tar file that the website backup routine made. If not, they are gone forever, at least from here. (They may live on in Google cache, but I’ll have lost them.)
Ah, well. I was forced to fix several problems with the old website and to clean up some database problems. So, in that sense, some good has come of this. It has still been very painful to get through. I’ll reinstall any other files I can in the next few days. For now, I’m back on line with a site that appears to be running fairly well. Albeit with a few less files.
