Raw

A whole day without a blog. The initial cause was probably that I went over my space limit on the server. The night before last I was getting obscure MySQL errors. I deleted a few of the bigger log files, but that didn't help. I suspected the DB had got corrupted. I also noticed I'd still got loads of Movable Type stuff in the DB, despite having moved over to WordPress. Before doing any messing, I did a backup (using this plugin). What hadn't occurred to me is that database + backup takes up more space than database. About 10MB more in this case. The situation got worse, by yesterday morning I couldn't reach anything on the site over HTTP - not even the PHP/MySQL admin bits. I wondered whether the host provider had cut me off. Of course they had my old email address, so to see if they'd sent any notification I had to go into Thunderbird and pick up mail there. Almost 3000 new messages. But nothing since the 08/11/2004 except one post on the 24th from Beulah Mayberry offering Val1um, and one from postmaster@virgilio.it saying my mailbox was full. Oh. Right. If the problem had occurred locally, I'd had rebooted (much earlier) so I decided to mail the host providers. By late evening the site was miraculously back up again (I didn't get any reply in email).

What I hadn't realised was how dependent I'd grown on this thing. Three or four times through the day I wanted a reference to something, and knowing I'd blogged it tried to load this site to search. Interesting that, it means I've actually been using my own personal knowledgebase, however crude it may be, in preference to Google. Extra incentive to get something more substantial set up (probably Kowari on the the server here, with proxies on my I/O).

I also missed the opportunity to post cat photos. Fortunately Seth had been pointing me towards Flickr, so I was able to satisfy the urge.