The Crash of my blog: Lessons Learned

by Rob on September 23, 2007 · View Comments

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If you are reading this, thanks for coming to my new URL. I had actually wanted to change to a simpler URL, but I did not want to do it under duress. But the database at my old URL decided to get totally messed up, and despite heroic efforts by my newest best friend, Moof, the old blog just wouldn’t work.

If you have not done so already, please change any links on your blog and re-subscribe to the RSS of this blog. I did change both Feedburner and Bloglines. I have already re-posted nearly all of the blog posts since the beginning of March. Since the old posts at the other URL are part of a bad database, I am only going to do selected posts that are older than that.

So here are some lessons I have learned:

Moof is the greatest. She has spent hours helping me get this thing back up and running. Without her, I would be lying in the gutter of the Internet: a broken man.
Back up your blog. It is ironic that someone so gung-ho about EMR would forget to do backups of the blog. I just did not think of it. If you host your own blog, do not count on your web hosting service to have a good backup. Do it yourself.
Have back-ups of your posts on your computer. I use Windows Live Writer to write my posts, and it stored all of my posts written on that editor in a folder in my My Documents folder. Republishing them to a new URL was easy. It is by far the easiest way to post on the blog (despite being made by Microsoft).
Internet explorer is evil. It is still impossible to get the blog to totally work on IE all the time. Firefox always makes it work. Just get Firefox, folks!!

The good news is that I have a nice new faster blog. I appreciate your good feedback. Plus, I will host grand rounds in 2 weeks, so I should be able get the masses aware of the move.

I really appreciate you, my loyal readers.

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{ 6 comments }

Moof September 23, 2007 at 5:45 am: Dr. Rob, you’d have done fine on your own, I’m certain. You were just so busy … and I happened to have some time, and was more than glad to help out.

Besides … it wasn’t altogether altruistic … I didn’t want to lose your blog!!! I mean, where else can I read about llamas and accordions?
rlbates September 23, 2007 at 2:37 pm: Aw Moof, don’t be so modest. You deserve his undying gratitude (and ours–his readers). Glad you are back Dr Rob.
jmb September 23, 2007 at 10:38 pm: Another appreciative nod to Moof, who proved again that she is the techie den mother of her corner of the blogosphere.
I can’t believe you weren’t backed-up, techie Dr Rob. But it didn’t help me totally as yesterday some glitch in Picasa web has deleted some of the images and photos from my blog back to February. Sigh!

I think the new site and speed of loading is fantastic.
regards
jmb
makeminetrauma September 24, 2007 at 12:08 am: I’ve been tagged and I’ve generously passed it on to you! Please link on my name to check it out.
I’m too technically challenged to embed my URL in a link in the comment section.

mmt
Or
http://intraoporate.blogspot.com/2007/09/tagged.html
makeminetrauma September 24, 2007 at 12:54 am: You said there wouldn’t be any math….
enrico September 24, 2007 at 3:30 am: Another tip for all who have have their own domains/hosted sites: Whether you use Wordpress, MoveableType, Drupal, WHATEVER, back up your DATABASE too. Backing up your posts is one thing (and definitely sound advice), but should your site go kablooey, rebuilding it would mean 1) tediously reposting the backed-up entries, 2) losing ALL of the comments, layout/theme, metadata, etc.

Almost every hosting provider gives a “Control Panel” (often, they use a product with that very name) with a link that says “phpMyAdmin.” Clicking that will bring you to the administration page where you select the name of your database in the left pull down. Don’t worry about the gobledeygook that you may see afterwards, just click the “Export” tab, then leave the defaults alone, EXCEPT at the bottom, check “Save as file” and give a name, like “WPDB-20070923″ — your browser will save the data as a file on your local computer. Should you ever need to repopulate your DB, do the same except click “Import” and upload your last backup.

You don’t need to understand what’s in the file, mind you, so don’t freak out by all the database-speak contained in it. If nothing else, you’ll have all the raw materials for a friend like Moof to help put Humpty Dumpty together again.