Back from the dead

Night before last, my blog vanished. Go to the blog’s front page and you’d get nothing. Nada. Rien. Not even a 404 error. No source code to view. Nothing.

My first thought was that I’d done something catastrophic. Like a child abused by his priest, I felt it was my fault. God was punishing me for blogging after midnight.

Jim Schuyler helped me troubleshoot the situation. It wasn’t my file permissions. It wasn’t a DNS error. It wasn’t my code. It wasn’t PHP. It wasn’t a dozen other things. It might some problem with MySQL. I called support. They wrote up a trouble ticket and said it might be a scripting error. They’d be back in touch. They weren’t. I redirected the blog URLs to a page saying “Internet Time Blog is taking a massage. If you need your daily fix of Jay, go to my former blog.”

Ten minutes ago I disabled the redirects and voilà! I was back in business. My theory is that after dark the sunspots were no longer getting through. Or perhaps when NSA could not find subversive material in my blog, they returned control to me. Of course, that doesn’t explain why my wiki just lost its mind.