You might not be able to read this. Apparantly ye old CogDogBlog has been crashing much this past week with Error Establishing Database Connection errors.
Oh no, Mr Bill!
One or two folks notified me (thanks Brian B and JR), but it hardly seems to have created havoc on the internet. I was on a vacation road trip and debugging my Reclaim Cloud dashboard in the car on a mobile device was not viable. What I could do is the venerable reboot / unplug / replug in.
My WordPress technical rust is showing. It took me a bit (thanks Reclaim for the docs) to find our where I could get to PHPMyAdmin on Reclaim Cloud. I had not done any optimize or database checks for eons. I also zapped some tables no longer in use. There’s a lot of “stuff” in the cellar.
Next was reviewing a few plugins that were not critical, a few that were rather old. And then digging amongst the various error logs to see what I could smell out.
Rust.
As near as I can tell there are issues with the age of my database and tables having different character encodings, older ones with tables using latin1_swedish_ci and newer ones using utf8 (thus the lack of emoji support in comments). The bits I read on fixes sound a bit intense and calling for some surgery inside SQL statements.
Fear not of wee handful of readers and various bots that fly by, with hopefully some support assist and a wee bit of luck, this old blog barge will sail again.
I thought I had an Uptime Robot monitor set uo, but alas no (now in place).
In lieu of blogging about blogging here is blogging about not blogging until the blog is fixed.
The blog shall rise again!
Featured Image: Broken flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license remixed with a screen shot of the Error Establishing a Database Connection message my site has been not so proudly displaying this week.
Well, Still True Friend, it was funny when you said Oh no Mr. Bill, because that is an old one, but not as old as me. Plus, I had a teacher once and we called him Mr. Bill because his first name was Bill at the same time as Mr. Bill was on.
If you go on Amazon.ca, you can order some special WD-40 for that rust. Plus, if you still have the red truck.
It is a special gift to make sure that all those WordPress that are belong to us keep going. Like when they added Gutenberg to make it easier for WordPress printing, but it really wasn’t, but you either have to stick with Classic Mode or start using Gutenberg one time. There is always a new word press thing to learn and then you have to fix all the old stuff.
Anyway, I hope you are safe from fires and flooding and locusts and all the other things.