Well, that was… interesting.

Earlier today I effectively killed newpageone.com again while trying to fix it. Here’s a short rundown of what happened:

  1. Noticed that comments had disappeared from the site and were no longer coming in.
  2. Looked up documentation on WordPress sites and tried to solve the problem.
  3. WordPress Codex made it apparent that I needed to repair my databases, but I did not have the tools to do such a thing installed on my server.
  4. Accidentally installed PHP/database tools in the directory where I have my blog set up.
  5. Panic.
  6. Call Yahoo support straight away and talk with Jason for two hours.
  7. Fix comment problem while creating a whole new one, essentially isolating the front page from the rest of the site.
  8. Jason technically can’t give me WordPress support, so he leaves me with suggestions and I go to it on my own.
  9. I ignore all of the new database information I’ve just learned and just export/import XML of all of my posts like I did the last time the site went down. I do this after deactivating my WordPress blog, starting a new one, and importing a nice big XML file with all of the site’s previous information.
  10. Plugging the XML in and fixing plugins/widgets now. If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know.

The reason the comments went down in the first place is because I get so much Spam that it crashes the comment database if I don’t clear it out every so often. Lesson learned!