The Scariest 15 Hours
First, I’d like to apologize for the state of My New Chimerical Kit. I know it doesn’t look too pretty right now. I promise I’ll get to that shortly.
Yesterday, at approximately 0:00 hours My New Chimerical Kit imploded. I’m not sure what caused it, but I got the dreaded “WordPress White Screen of Death.” I had gotten this “error” message once before on NaNoWriMo MyNeChimKi Style, but I only had a grand total of three posts collected so I simply deleted the entire thing and started over (thank goodness for MarsEdit 2 for easy blog retrieval, at least for the most recent posts). However My New Chimerical Kit contains posts from as far back as 2004! I immediately began Googling possible solutions for restoring WordPress blogs that get “The White Screen of Death.”
To no avail, I was unable to fully restore the blog through the suggestions of others who have experienced this. What I was able to do was create a brand new install, change the directory that the old corrupt install was located in, and use a cute little program called BigDump.php to do a staggered mySQL dump import into the new mySQL database. Unfortunately, there was something corrupt in my original mySQL database. Try as I might, when I tried to restore with the old database I would get “The White Screen of Death” over and over again in the new installs. That’s when I got smart.
I ended up exporting only the tables that I felt I absolutely had to have (e.g., posts, post metadata, and comments). Bingo! Well, almost bingo. The posts and the comments restored beautifully, which you can now see here in this new incarnation of My New Chimerical Kit. Unfortunately, the metadata didn’t restore at all. I’m not sure if that’s because it couldn’t or it was corrupt. And 15 hours later the new My New Chimerical Kit was born.
In any case, I’m happy to have the blog back. And I know that all my faithful readers will bear with me while I reconstruct at least some of the metadata. I’d been wanting to excise all the extraneous categories that had resulted when I migrated my blog over from Blogger and LiveJournal anyway. I’m going to look at this as my golden opportunity to do just that.
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[...] tried not to panic. I got in touch with Whitney right away, because she recently had the same thing happen to her. She did help, but the longer things went with no blog, the more freaked out I became. [...]