Apologies if you have visited this site any time in the last 12 hours or so, and noticed that it didn’t look quite right. Something caused complete chaos…
I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth. In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog. This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos. Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.
I am still not quite sure what happened. I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason. I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.
Ironic that I was about to take a full site back-up and install a later version of WordPress! Thankfully, my host service provider, my good friend Stephen Brehaut at Sricom, was able to ride in on his white horse this morning and roll back the site to Tuesday, and I have not lost anything!
It is at times like this that you realise how much you come to depend on your blog, particularly when it is at the heart of your business!
Still, if you rely on older technologies like paper, they can be just as vulnerable to various sorts of damage…
