Homer Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just shot my blog in the foot, or more accurately, I didn’t follow IT 101 and back things up before making a change.

I had moved my site to be completely WordPress based a while ago, and as a result I had a bit of a convoluted setup on my server.

When I first set up my WordPress blog it was as a sub-domain of accuweaver.com, and was housed at http://wordpress.accuweaver.com/ (also aliased to http://blog.accuweaver.com/). The http://www.accuweaver.com/ site just static pages that hadn’t changed for years.

So when I finally got my blog set up to host the few static pages I had, I just changed the directory on my server to have a symbolic link to the directory where wordpress.accuweaver.com had it’s content:

1. Removed the directory httpdocs from /var/www/vhosts/accuweaver.com
2. Added a link in that folder to /var/www/vhosts/accuweaver.com/subdomains/wordpress/httpdocs.

This actually worked really well, since the content was only in one place, and all I had to do was change the host name in WordPress.

The problem came in recently when I was diagnosing a different problem with my server (mail wasn’t working). I noticed a weird error message on the Plesk control panel telling me there was a problem with a software update due to permission problems.

In hindsight I realize this was because Plesk was trying to update a config file multiple times, and either it had the wrong permissions, or the file was being accessed by multiple threads.

At any rate, I decided to simplify my directory tree and get rid of the symlink. So I deleted the symlink, and copied the directory to the right place on my server for the accuweaver.com site  (for Plesk this turns out to be /var/www/vhosts/accuweaver.com) and checked my server: all good.

Then, thinking (but not thinking it through) it would be easier, I decided to to use the Plesk control panel to remove the old sub-domains. I didn’t want to just delete their directories, because I figured there would be stuff left behind in the database and I’d never be able to remove them.

What didn’t occur to me was this: I had originally installed WordPress through the Plesk control panel, and so unexpectedly (at least to me) when I deleted wordpress.accuweaver.com as a subdomain, the panel decided to help me out and delete the WordPress tables in the database.

As a result I got a completely misleading message on my home page that told me there was a database connectivity issue. What that actually meant was that the tables holding all my posts, users and subscribers was now completely gone.

The one saving moment for me was when I realized that because I’m running WP Super Cache, all of my posts have actually been translated to static HTML pages.

So while it’s going to be painful, I should be able to get most of them back and posted eventually. I downloaded a local copy of the cache, and have started rebuilding my server.

But before that, I’ll be setting up a backup and trying to remember to actually do one …

Related articles

• mfunc in WP Super Cache 1.4 and beyond
• WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

I got my basic RESTful service working for the VolunteerCake project, and everything was working swimmingly, until I needed to turn on debug to figure something out …

When I had the debug level set to less than two (2) calling the action I was interested in with an extension of “.xml” was working fine. I got back the XML representation of the data in the action I was interested in returned with content-type of “application/xml”. In Cake, if you turn debug to 2 (or 3) it will dump out the SQL that was run in an HTML table.

The problem is that this HTML table is actually spit out after the rest of the view, meaning that my RESTful service no longer has a well formed document to display. Additionally (for reasons I’ve yet to isolate), when this happens, the document is returned with a content-type of “text/html” instead of “application/xml” as expected. Neither of these things would be acceptable if the site is to provide web services, since it would mean the web services would be broken as soon as somebody needed to debug.

The workaround for this is to manually reset the debug level when the extension of “xml” is detected. Since the debug data is useful, and it’s just the SQL that appears to break the XML, I asked on the IRC channel what the last place I could set the debug might be. The suggestion was to put it either in the afterFilter, or the end of the view itself.

I found that if I put the following code into the beforeFilter method, I could prevent the problem with the price of losing my debug output:

if ($this->params['url']['ext'] == 'xml'){
Configure::write('debug',1);
$this->RequestHandler->respondAs('xml');
}

That same code placed in the afterFilter method gave me the debug output in a well formed XML document (excluding the SQL table), as did placing it in the view itself. This leads me to believe that when debug > 1 there is some code that happens after the beforeFilter that is not setting the content type to “application/xml” as would be expected from our routing rules.

Being the bulldog that I am, I dug into the Cake source code to see if I could figure this out. I found the spot where the SQL table was being built, which turned out to be in the showLog() method of the dbo_source.php, which is called by the close() method. Since the close() is called after the view is finished, and the showLog() method simply prints the data, that explains why it breaks the XML. It definitely breaks the MVC encapsulation, since the data gets dumped into an HTML table and spit out after the view is complete.

On the IRC channel, it was suggested that I try creating a data source that would override the showLog method and spit that table out to a table, which might be worth trying.

I posted my question on the CakePHP Google Group and got the useful suggestion to use the FirePHP plugin which basically writes the log data to the FirePHP plugin so it can be displayed in FireBug. So my approach will be to write a dbo_mysql_firephp.php class that does just that. This will at least resolve the MVC encapsulation issue and keep my view relatively clean.

I still want to figure out exactly why the content-type isn’t getting set properly, but for now I have a workaround that I’ll use, and I’ll add the FirePHP debugging to solve the well-formed XML issue if I ever do figure out the content-type problem.

Off to set up my FirePHP plugin and build the dbo class now …

Being a fairly knowledgeable network person, I spent hours trying to diagnose the problem. I could get to all other web sites, but not to anything in the plaxo.com domain. Worse, I could resolve, ping and traceroute looked fine.

First I thought it might be something caused by Plaxo being bought by Comcast. Comcast had just recently been in the news for blocking traffic to keep bandwidth available, so I figured it wasn’t inconceivable that somebody made a mistake in a firewall somewhere that was blocking traffic between them and AT&T.

I sent an email to Plaxo to ask them if their site was up, and called AT&T to see if we could diagnose the problem. AT&T as usual was very nice (and annoying) and started me out with the normal insane steps:

1. Turn off your firewall
2. Clear your cache
3. Turn off your router

After getting past all the annoying stuff, I got to their level 2 support, and then to the 2Wire support to see if they could find anything with my router that might be causing this. Naturally they found nothing, and everything looked OK.

So I escalated with Plaxo, calling them on the phone to see if there was anything they could do. There were emails and phone calls back in forth that never solved the problem:

• First call I was told that there was a problem with one of their servers, and that it would be working the next day (not).
• Another call I was told they had found the problem in their web server, and it would be fixed shortly
• I got numerous emails telling me to uninstall the Plaxo software and log in again, which of course didn’t work since I couldn’t even get to the web site.
• I had numerous emails diagnosing the problem as a Mac issue, or a PC issue, which again it wasn’t since it was happening on the Mac, iPhone and PC (and the iPhone doesn’t even have a Plaxo client).

Finally at some point, I got a support guy who told me that my IP address was indeed blocked at their server. Now we’re getting somewhere. But no, it still doesn’t work.

Luckily for me this guy is good, so he tells me that there was an old version of the Plaxo client for Mac that their servers were detecting as a bot attack, so if I uninstall that everything should be golden. I do, and lo and behold I can get to Plaxo again …

So it appears that Plaxo can be incompatible with itself …

I wonder how many people are blocked with the same problem right now.

I saw a very interesting talk by Walter Feigenson at the last CPC Job Connections meeting about marketing yourself using the web.

I already had a LinkedIn profile, and had my resume on a couple different places, but his talk convinced me that I ought to do some more. So I did the following:

1. Set up Google reader so I can see all the web changes in one place.
2. Built a profile on Naymz (http://www.naymz.com), unclear on exactly what this one does.
3. Ziki (http://www.ziki.com) – Signed up, but never got the validation email. This is supposed to be a job finding service.
4. Spokeo (http://www.spokeo.com) – Signed up – not clear on what this site does beyond search for names.
5. Ziggs (http://www.ziggs.com) – Signed up and built profile, this one looks interesting.

Just signing up for these things takes time, getting them to be consistent seems like it will be a pain. It reminds me of posting your resume to all of the job search sites. Not too bad the first time, but then going back to update is going to be hard.

Next thing I did was to add cross links from as many different places as I could to my web site (http://www.accuweaver.com). This is supposed to help with the ranking on the search engines, since the search engines use the assumption that if a lot of sites link to you, you must be important.

I also cleaned up my LinkedIn profile, added links, and added my company to the Companies part of LinkedIn.Then after all of this, I got hit again with the suggestion that I should set up a Facebook profile. Walt had mentioned it, but it took hearing it a few more times for me to act.  It still seems a bit smarmy, and unlikely to be useful as a business networking tool, but we’ll see.

Next: Making sure I’m posted on a huge list of sites I got from Valerie Colber …