So I’m at work and you’d think I’d be working, but I’m not. I’ve pretty much been FUCKING WITH MY WEB SITE all day. Sure sure, I’ve processed an assload of emails and interacted with a few coworkers and dispatched some data installs, but mostly I’ve just been fucking with goblinbox.com.

I’ve had this site for so long that I don’t know if I can express how disturbing it is to me when it’s down! I hate it! It’s like knowing your furnace is broken or your plumbing’s blocked, or that something about your home is fucked up enough that it will take a great deal of concentrated effort to get it UN-fucked.

I had to remove and reinstall MT yet again, because after taking away the IP and going back to name-based DNS on a shared-IP server, the database (where the password table is stored) just wouldn’t work. No matter what. I tried deleted the db and making a new one, but that didn’t work. So I ended up deleting the database, removing all traces of MT from the server, reinstalling and reinitializing MT, and importing the entries I’d salvaged off the old server.

After fucking with MT for over an hour, I decided I was pissed at it and installed a copy of WordPress instead, but it actually lets you break it by changing one of the settings through the interface, so while it’s terribly cute it’s hardly a step up from MT.

I also moved about a gig of crap: the galleries folder, my procs folder, tons of other files… strangely enough it took until 4:00 before the network security dude finally complained that I’d set of an FTP traffic alarm in the firewall!

Snort!

My templates are gone, eaten with the rest of my old MT database. I’ll have to rebuild them by hand, and even though I’ve done it a hundred times now it’s still tedious to have to recreate all that work.

Many, many links on the site still don’t work, and won’t until I can find them and fix them. My feedback form doesn’t work because I haven’t had time to install a formmail script or find out if this server has one pre-installed, not to mention edit the form itself.

Rants 7 is up and running but although I imported the Rants 6 content and didn’t get a single error, I don’t know where it is. I posted a request for help at the iB tech boards and hopefully some kind soul will enlighten me about the mysteries of SQL dbs and what they want.

Overall, this has not been the kind of fun geek odyssey that the LAST two server crashes were. I mean, I used to enjoy the learning curve, but there isn’t one any more. It’s grunt work, and it’s tedious. I think I will become Queen of Anally Frequent Backups in my old age so that I won’t suffer another loss of this magnitude again. I guess I shouldn’t be so attached to my content, but honestly there are images and information on this site that I don’t keep anywhere else. I use my blog to look up dates and events all the time. When I wrote my ‘Jefferson County Hospital Tried to Kill Me’ post I wanted and expected it to stay there because the lawyer Brett’s hired to contest the $450 invoice actually told me to write an account of what happened before I forgot!

I’ve been wanting to prune the dead weight off this site for awhile, and this move will certainly accomplish that. But I’m already bummed for stuff I’ve lost and haven’t even discovered yet!