Database Pains
Spent part of the day trying to work out some database problems with the sites that recently went down. It began when Amy tried to post a comment on her blog and Wordpress was having none of it. I was preoccupied with getting a tutorial done for another one of my sites, Handplane Central so I couldn’t get on to Amy’s problem right away but, eventually, I threw myself into it. I kept seeing broken “commands” at the top of all of her pages and thought that the database must have become corrupted in some way. After a bit of screwing around I managed to track the problem down and fix it.
Later on tonight I’m writing the text for said tutorial on hand planes (again using WordPress I might add) when I do a routine “save”. All of a sudden I get a stupid 404 error when everything should’ve been fine. I remembered that I’d had some trouble on this very blog with that sort of thing a while back. Fortunately I was able to hit the back button and all of my newly written paragraphs appeared again. I then spent the next five minutes or so cutting and pasting text to try and ascertain just what it was that was giving me all the hassle. I finally tracked it down to one word and one word only – curl. Yup, I remembered that was the word that had given me all that trouble on a Speckled Band post. Can’t remember what I changed it to back then but I did know that “curl” is a php command (I think) which, obviously, causes some distress to the program. The sucky thing is that I wanted to use the word curl, not “spiral” or “curve” or what have you — curl dammit!
So then I wanted to find out exactly why curl would cause me so much grief. Not finding anything at the main WordPress site — their search engine is hellishly annoying and inefficient — I decided to Google. I found a whole heap of useful stuff. Actually, that’s a lie….. I found stuff, some of it was useful; but mostly I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble with that particular word. The solution was that there would always be a problem if the program tried to parse (I think thats the term) the word. One way around it though was to write the word in such a way that the program would be savvy to – as html code. Hence & #99;url (lose the space) becomes curl.
Simple! Problem solved!
p.s. Can you tell that nothing really much happened today? That’s the problem when you decide to post every day – or try to at least!
Hopefully something mildly amusing or remotely interesting will happen tomorrow. Otherwise too bad!
