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Thingamablog Problems
Posted on Monday, September 17, 2007 at 12:26 AM by Jason Barker
Those of you who subscribe to this blog may have received through the RSS feed an article announcing the new website/blog for Get Wisdom, the radio show I am creating. If so, you might also notice that the article is not on this blog.
Thingamablog, the blog software I use for this blog (as well as Get Wisdom's site), suffered a database problem and erased the custom template I use with this blog. I believe the problem is that the database entry for the style sheet became corrupted; when Thingamablog created the post about Get Wisdom, therefore, it could not access the style sheet. This caused Thingamablog to revert the format of the entire blog to a built-in template that does not require a style sheet, and thus the heavily formatted blog content became unreadable (also lost were all the graphics and site-specific code I'd inserted into the templates). The problem was compounded by the fact that something in this train wreck also caused Thingamablog to refuse to accept the backup I had made earlier today.
By going into the database, and laboriously replacing the default template with my custom template (minus a few bits of code that were not worth reconstructing), I was able to bring the blog back, minus the post I'd written just before the whole thing crashed.
The main thing missing is the subscription form for Feedblitz. I didn't bother to rebuild the form because: 1) in the history of the blog, fewer than five people have subscribed to the blog using Feedblitz; and 2) Feedblitz is now inserting ads into the bottom of the articles it sends out. While I'm continuing to send the feed through Feedblitz for the handful of people who are currently subscribed through the service, the lack of popularity of this offering causes me to believe it isn't worth the trouble to rebuild and reinsert the form.
I think I have everything up and running again, but please contact me via email or AIM if you encounter a display problem or broken link on the blog.
Posted in Miscellaneous