"We Have A Technical"...
...as Gary Numan used to 'sing'.
currybetdotnet has been down most of this week. I've rather unexpectedly had to move servers, and not just move servers but move from *nix/Apache/Perl to Windows/PHP/Perl/mySQL. Still, the steepest learning curves are the most satisfying I'm assured.
Like many people who work in IT I am aware of the 'concept' of a vigorous back-up regime, but somewhat alien to the execution of it. Hence I now have some broken fragments of the old site rescued from Movable Type's flat-text db files, and a CD back-up from around three months ago, that is of precious little use, what with its pesky reliance on Apache 'include virtual' statements when I'm now on a Windows server. That'll learn me.
(Mind you, it isn't quite as bad as the days at Reckless Record where every night I faithfully made a tape back-up of the data on the server, and then carefully stored it in a box above the self-same server, thus ensuring that if fire engulfed the branch both the server and data back-up for all of the London branches would go up together like the tin soldier and his love.)
Still, I always try to look at situations as an opportunity rather than a setback, and suddenly I have the opportunity to rebuild the site from scratch. To paraphrase the sorely missed Douglas Adams, normal service will be resumed shortly, just as soon as I've worked out what normal service is actually going to be...
Posted by Martin Belam, June 10, 2005
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About Martin Belam
I'm an Internet consultant and writer, with 8 years experience in product management, information architecture, and user experience design for global brands like Sony, Vodafone, The Guardian and the BBC. I specialise in advising on search, widgets, RSS, online news publishing and bulk email delivery.
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10 comments so far
You can do SSIs with ASP if you really wanted to. But apparantly they work differently to Apache ones. Or so I was told.
PHP is sexier. Probably...
PHP includes are pretty simple. It helps too if you can turn PHP on and off for different file extensions (so you don't have to break permalinks).
Oh, and Bloglines has most of your old entries if you get desperate...
Oh don't worry, the permalinks are going to be well and truly broken whether PHP is on or not - the old site was such a tangled mess under-the-hood, and the URLs reflected that. A nice clean start for me here.
Good tip about Bloglines though, that has been a great help.
Now I'm off to raid the Google cache...
Anything is sexier than ASP...
Now what would be nice would be if MT had an auto-export function. Exports all your blogs, emails/ftps the contents or something, on a regular basis.
Between Bloglines, an out-of-date backup and Google's cache (particular the cache of http://iaslash.org/ which sucks in the currybetdotnet feed) I've got pretty much everything text-wise back in one form or another.
Now I just have to work out a *sensible* way of re-publishing the worthwhile stuff.
But why?
That is quite an open-ended question Nick ;-)
I came looking for you this week and you weren't here... I was mildly alarmed, wondering if it was a scheduled thing or a bit of unexpected excitement. Glad to see you're back up and running - your audience missed you.
So what was the best new thing/surprise you discovered in the midst of an (I guess) irritating rebuild?
The best thing is being free of horrible legacy folders cluttering up my webspace, but by far the nicest thing has been that several people actually noticed the site disappeared and asked after it.