Hooray! Two things saved me:
1. many years of playing about with MySql Databses meant that I roughly understood how to rehash a saved dump file to relaod a new database and then rehash the config files and reupload missing data.
2. I did a mega save only last week, so there wasn’t that much lost – Phew!
I think you’ll find everything is back in working order on shoo-tube.com now.
I thought I would do a bit on online housekeeping this morning and oops! I’ve deleted my Drawing School Database! Not a brilliant idea. Luckily I have quite a recent backup, but it was for the whole database including the schema. The database doesn’t like that, so I’ve had to go into text edit, strip out the schema data and all the other bits that aren’t needed. It’s taking forever to reimport. I hope it works, otherwise that’s a year’s work down the drain!
My Brother has been nagging on at me for a while about XAMPP. “Wassat?” you ask. It’s a brilliant bit of software that I got working on my mac this morning that installs an Apache server, Mysql for a database and PHP which lets you do cool stuff with databases on the web. It works on PC and linux too.
But this is not on the web. It is a local web server for web development, which means I can try out lots of stuff on my computer and not screw up my website in the meantime. I mananged to set all this up before. It took me the best part of a day and everything stopped working when I upgraded to Mac OsX Snow Leopard. I couldn’t be bothered to work out what to do.
But This morning, I went over to www.apachefriends.org, downloaded the package and I was up and running in about two minutes – amazing! Ten minutes later, I’d worked out what was going on and had a new install of the Joomla! content management system running locally on my desktop. How brilliant is that?! Well, it is. Fiddling about with a live website on line can be quite dangerous. Yesterday, I wanted to see how permissions worked for registered users. Before I knew it, I’d lost a whole menu. I had to spend half an hour rebuilding it. Much better to experiment on a local site that can be trashed and rebuilt at will.
I am not a programmer nor a techy, but with something this simple, I’ll be happy and confident to learn through making mistakes on a site that isn’t live or critical and that no one else can see.
