Looks like the site is having database issues at the moment. Might have to restore from the last backup, which was yesterday. I’ll investiage shortly when I’ve got the tools for the job. It might just need a repair, it might need more.

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

My health has been in question over the past few days. Nothing serious, I’ve just got a cold that refuses to actually get going. I’ll get the sore throat, which will disappear and then reappear, along with the full nose, which would gdo the same. Ergh. Not good.

Anyway, in response to Noscere’s post, I’m going to post some of the WordPress plugins I use, just so you know what goes on “behind the scenes”. Note that I won’t mention security related plugins here!

First up is Akismet. Nothing really much to say about this particular little utility. It saves me having to delete spam, and with just over 45,000 spam comments at the time of typing, it’s saved me some work!

Secondly, there’s iMax Width, and no, it’s nothing to do with the branch of cinema. It forces any image I post on here to a maximum width of 500 pixels. Normally, this is the case anyway, as most of the photos I post come from Flickr, which automatically have a width of 500, but I’ve seen on a couple of occasions, I’ve posted one of the bigger sizes, meaning that if this plugin wasn’t there, the page would look like shite. And what do you mean by “it does anyway”?

Next up is Stapress reloaded. When work stalled on the original Statpress plugin, several spin-offs were released. This is just one of them. I’m not sure if work has halted on this too. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still usable. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the number-one cause of slowness on the site, as the database size grows quickly.

And then, we have Twitter Tools. I must admit to still not fully understanding Twitter. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters to say something? And if I want to send someone a private message, I don’t want that 140 characters eaten in by whoever’s user name it is. I use it mainly for giving a quick twitter update, announcing a new blog post (which I’ll probably do with this one), and for quickly creating a bit.ly link, should I want to pass the link to someone else. I’m sure someone will give me a reason why twitter is so… erm, needed. Saying that, when a celebrity is reported to be dead, it’s the first place I look.

WordPress Database Backup is pretty much redundant to me, as since installation, I have other backup mechanisms in place. I don’t think I’ve used it in about 2 years. It’s infinitely slower than my other methods, and I only keep it in place for emergencies.

And if it isn’t our old friend, Google XML Sitemaps up next! (You can tell I’m really starting to struggle for introductions to these) which creates an XML sitemap readable by Google, presumably so it understands the site better. Or something.

Last up, because I can’t be bothered to do anymore, and I can already see Chad’s eyes glazing over is WP tags to Technorati, and is the reason there’s two sets of tags in here. I assumed it would help the blog get “noticed” (though I always seem to complain or get overly paranoid when it does get partially popular), and was installed after the “tags” feature was added to WordPress. I’m not sure if it provides any benefit anymore, as the plugin hasn’t been updated since the iron age, and the amount of hits I get from technorati is negligible, so I’m not even sure if it works anymore.

To answer the questions you weren’t thinking of, no I don’t use any type of cache plugin. It caused me headaches last year, and to think this blog generates any type of server load that would require cache usage, would simply be delusion on my part. The only time I’ve generated noticeable server load was when I posted that Jeremy Beadle had died about 2 years ago. It soon quietened down as soon as word started to spread across the interwebs. Obviously, with the introduction of the afore-mentioned twitter, I wonder how many people do the same as me, and just bypass Google altogether….

Right, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get my body in order shortly. I’m off work for the next few days.

UPDATE: 5th Sep 19:47… Everything should be back to normal.

Gah. Sorry about the downtime for both of you who noticed it. It’s not often there’s downtime on one of the busiest times of the week. OK, I lie, I mean 2nd busiest times of the week… (You don’t really know how busy it gets on a Friday night do you? – Ed)

Er, no. Either way, there were probably some hits lost.

It all started at about 9:30. I went to make some changes to one of my wonderful databases, when it turned out I couldn’t connect. Odd.

Minutes later, the webhosts updated their status site with the following….

21.36: We are presently looking at an issue affecting
this server

Bimler, they were aware of the issue, and all I had to do now is sit back and wait for someone to flick the switch. Surely everything tech related is fixed by the old “turning it off and on again” routine.

I waited. And waited.

22:30: Engineers have now determined the cause of this fault
and are working to restore the system ASAP.
Services should be restored shortly.

That’s some fault if it took them 54 minutes to diagnose it. Still, shortly means shortly. I suppose all I had to do was sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Can’t be long now.

I waited. In my immense boredom, I watched two full episodes of “Scotland Tonight”, the Scottish 6PM News programme on ITV (or rather, STV). It was dire. In fact, half way through the second edition I promptly fell asleep at the computer desk.

I awoke to a full moon, shining through the stained glass windows of Mercuryvapour Towers, and a hopefully restored website.

00:25: Despite repeated attempts to restore the system, the
physical prohost1.34sp.com server cannot be correctly
accessed. We suspect a hardware related issue at this time.
As a result a standy box is now being brought online to
restore services. All data is stored on a highly redundant
central NAS system, so data is unaffected by the loss of
the orginal prohost1.34sp.com machine.

Well, it became clear that the “restored services” wasn’t going to be the case. Oddly, despite the fact the web / SQL access was kaput, email could still be received. This is quite ironic, seeing as the hosts don’t actually backup any email “free of charge”. Everything else is backed up every Wednesday.

Fearing the worst, this at least allowed me the opportunity to move the mailboxes to somewhere that never suffers any downtime at all – Gmail. Yes, yes, I know, I’m being facetious there, but that’s where the mail was moved to.

I fell asleep again.

This time I woke up at 3AM, and my lovely website responded to everything I threw at it. In fact, it had been like this for 90 minutes or so…

01:30: The server is now back online and all services
restored. No data has been affected as a result of this
fault.

And now, here you are, reading this website as if nothing ever happened. It’s made a hideous dent in my newly acquired pingdom status, however…

85.35%… I see.

Gah! For those who were silly enough to a) be awake and b) sad enough to access this site between between 3AM and 7:30AM, you’ll have found that you received an error message along the lines of “Error establishing a database connection”. This was because the database ‘thing’ decided to pop its clogs and stop responding.

I reported the issue on the webhost’s support forum, but unfortunately, nothing happened for approximately 4 hours, and the site was left in a state of limbo, until someone from 34SP spotted the problem and rebooted the server…

Thankfully, this type of thing doesn’t happen too often, and it’s the first downtime I’ve noticed since my switch to the new server a few months ago, and to be fair to the hosts, this type of downtime should have been brought to their attention, and they’re looking into why it didn’t occur.

Sadly, this website feckup also occured with yet more flickr downtime, and as one of my forum haunts ObscureInternet is hosted on the same server as this site, it also suffered the same downtime as I did, which means that my entire nightshift was wasted actually doing work. Oh, OK, I only posted that last sentence to see if the “facebook grass” has spread onto personal websites yet!

Now, if you don’t mind me, I’ve got some Roger Whittaker to listen to.