In which my faith in the cloud was tested, then restored
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on January 14, 2009
Some of you might have noticed that our site was down for a couple of days. Things went awry when I installed another program that corrupted some key WordPress files. Like any serious professional who cares deeply about what s/he does, I completely freaked out upon reading “Fatal error” in lieu of “World A.T. Ways” on our front page.
Before launching our site, Barbara and I researched several hosting services and chose Bluehost for it’s stellar customer service and ease-of-use. I know a bit about technology but my expertise lies squarely in the realm of applied educational uses, not PHP programming. Bluehost is great for folks like me who know just enough code to recognize it for what it is, but couldn’t speak a word of it.
So when the problem occurred, I immediately logged onto my Bluehost account, clicked the “Restore Backup” button and rejoiced…wait not yet. The backup system did not recover the key files to get the blog up and running again. When I called Bluehost technical support, a specialist answered the call promptly. On hold, listening to Sam and Dave’s Hold on, I’m Comin’, I celebrated while images of the Bluehost guru working his magic populated my thoughts. The music faded away. “Sorry, we attempted to recover the files, it doesn’t look promising.”
Faith tested, I looked up to the heavens, reached for the clouds and shouted…”Wait”… the cloud. Google caches everything, right? Now we were going to do this my way—the old school, duct tape and bubblegum, MacGyver way. First I went to my Friendfeed page to see all the old post titles and the dates each was published. Then, I began searching for each using Google and Live. Next, I found the cached link under each search result and PRESTO, there was my post, archived by the Google. Finally, I bookmarked all of the cached files in Diigo. All of my work was cached in the cloud. I even noticed that Diigo caches a site when you bookmark it. I had multiple copies of our writings! As soon as our site is 6 months old, we’ll even be archived in the WayBack Machine forever and always. After having uncovered all of the files, for extra protection in the future, I searched for a WordPress plugin that would email me regular backups of key files.
http://flickr.com/people/kainet/
The final step towards the salvation of the site was to extract just the posts from the cached pages. However, if I copied all of the the source code from the entire page and pasted it back into the post window of WordPress, I’d create an even bigger mess than before. Luckily, I discovered the ability in Firefox to right click on the mouse and choose “View Selection Source”. With this option, I could highlight just the posts themselves, copy the source code of just that part and paste each back into WordPress.
Of course, by the time I had figured all of this out, Phil, our go-to PHP guy, had restored just about everything the way real IT folks do. And although I was not able to rescue the site my way—the old school, duct tape and bubblegum, MacGyver way, the crisis restored my faith in the cloud. I learned that the Net is there to catch us when we crash, particularly when all else fails and we don’t know enough to recover our files the real IT way. Please join us in solidarity and share your near-death web experiences by commenting on this post.
In which my faith in the cloud was tested, then restored by Kevin Gaugler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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