The apparent bugs in the lexicon got much worse today. The page didn’t seem to load fully when I tried to edit it, and then when I returned to see the original page it appears to be gone entirely. The problem is thus twofold: (1) Does anyone know whether the HTML is recorded anywhere? I have heard about interweb archives but I have no idea how to access it or whether it applies to this site. (2) How do we figure out what happened and how to fix the code? I guess that we will probably need to hold a fundraiser and pay a programmer.
Thanks.
***Update***
Credit goes to demomondian for sending me a copy of the Google cache that let me extract the source code. I just plugged the code into the WP edit box and whammo! the page is back. But now I cannot edit it. Here is the error message:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /home/jcole010/domains/golive.balloon-juice.com/public_html/wp-includes/kses.php(1005) : runtime-created function on line 1
Either we’re halfway there, or I just broke something even worse.
Keith
You want the Wayback Machine
jwb
Some version of it has also been cached by Google: http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:2m1sT52JsIwJ:www.balloon-juice.com/%3Fpage_id%3D27077+balloon+juice+lexicon&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Alex
I’ve sent the html from Google’s cache to Tim. Seems like it’s less than 48 hours old. Good luck with the restoration.
Fr33d0m
The last archived page on the wayback machine is from July 16, 2008.
leet
even home users should do regular backups, ignorant liberals.
WyldPiratd
Every time I close my eyes and think of Sarah Palin winking at me on my teevee I get a serious resurrection.
And I see starbursts, also. Too.
/rich lowry
Oh, shit. My bad, Tim. You had an actual question.
soonergrunt
Of all the things you could’ve lost instead of the lexicon, you still have that $Palin ad. Why couldn’t that have crashed instead?
Fr33d0m
If I had this problem, the first place I’d look is the database. It seems unlikely that something deleted the page since the ID number is still 27077. Perhaps it has some data corruption that isn’t allowing it to display.
Here is a link that summarizes their table structure: http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table_Overview
I’d guess the wp_posts table would be a good starting point but the wp_postmeta table might be a place to check as well.
Souvik
I doubt if the data actually got deleted. It is probably not getting displayed due to some bad tags. In case it has check with your hosting center to see if they maintain database backups. If not, start by getting that service. There are other ways to take database backups for wordpress. The webmistress may have already something in place.
Napoleon
Tim, I happen to have a page open to it and when I saw this I saved it to my desktop. I will try and e-mail you what I saved.
bliprob
If you’re using a recent wordpress version, you should have a list of page revisions (at the bottom of the “Edit Page” page) that you can revert to or copy text from. Unless your database was corrupted, in which case you need to get your ISP to pull the data files for yesterday, and get the lexicon from there. If you’re using WP Super Cache there’s chance the rendered HTML is in a cache file somewhere.
And I can’t recall if you (Tim F.) are using a Mac, but if so, you can easily add a daily event to your iCal that runs a two-line AppleScript that will grab a copy of the page HTML and save it to your hard drive. Here’s the AppleScript:
set dateFileName to do shell script “date +%Y%m%d”
set pageString to do shell script “curl \”https://balloon-juice.com/?page_id=27077\” > ~/” & dateFileName & “.html”
It will save a copy of the lexicon to your home directory. Paste that into the AppleScript Editor and save it somewhere. Then add a new recurring event to iCal, and set the alarm type to “Run script”, and pick the script you saved. Then you’ll get daily (or whatever) backups of the page HTML on your hard drive.
p m
google search says people have run into similar problems using older versions of WP, sometimes because of conflict with plugins.
you could try disabling plugins (from your admin) to see if that rescues the situation. also a good idea to make sure you’re running up-to-date versions of WP and whatever plugins you use.
worst comes to worst, make a new version of the page then set up a redirect (using an .htaccess file or a WP plugin like “redirection”) to automatically send people from the original page to the new one. the lexicon has been widely linked already so you don’t want it to come up blank at its original URL.
good luck.
Lee
How about dropping that ghetto implementation and turn it into a wiki?
Zach
Scrap WordPress and do a basic mediawiki installation ripping off Wiktionary … bonus being that everyone else can do the work for you. Could probably put ads back in very easily.
Tim F.
@Napoleon: Thanks, but I didn’t see the lexicon when I opened your file. Don’t close or update that page! Right click on it and select ‘view page source’, and send me everything that comes up as a Word file.
@Alex: Your email did not arrive. Can you send it again?
SGEW
I knew the lexicon would lead to tears.
demimondian
Tim…
What kind of computer are you working on? I’m guessing it’s a Mac. (Don’t get me started. Inferior products with lots of glitz, manufactured by slave laborers in ShenZ…never mind.)
Alex
@Tim F
I sent it to the email address linked at the top of the home page, the Yahoo one… You probably have my email address from this post. Ping me and I’ll send it to another if that’s more useful or put it up so you can download it, along with a .webarchive file (Mac).
General Winfield Stuck
@SGEW:
ditto
Brandon
So this is not a post/thread about Battlestar Galactica? /scratches head.
Bryant
I’m not a regular or anything, but you probably don’t need to hire someone to fix this. If the ideas suggested here don’t work, given access I could probably recover it in an hour max, and any other UNIX geek with some WordPress experience could do the same.
Feel free to email me if you want. Credentials available on request. I’d just hate to see y’all shell out a few hundred bucks for a relatively simple task.
Joshua Norton
There’s a “WordPress for Dummies” book available at Amazon. Used copies start at around $1.00. I just ordered one yesterday so I can’t say if it covers this issue or not, but it would probably be a worthwhile investment for dealing with the nuts and bolts and irritating glitches of WordPress.
daryljfontaine
WordPress stores all of its work in a database, which can be recovered by anyone with the database savvy and the login credentials. Not too terrible, but you need someone you can trust with the keys to the blog.
D
evolutionary
Hi Tim,
I just opened the lexicon with no problem. Did you do something or did my magic XP/Firefox touch heal it?
don't worry about fundraising
Seconding Bryant- this should be a situation where a moderately competent LAMP-savvy reader can probably rescue the data and get it squared away, so you don’t need to raise any money. I’ve fixed a couple bizarre WP bugs on high-traffic sites.
Would be happy to talk about options for better server performance over an email or two, too.
Joshua Norton
Someone with Admin rights should check to see how much space you have left. If it’s low, it’s time to clean house. Maybe those archives that cause John so much distress.
Mike M
That last error message is something I’ve run into recently – it means there’s something in your PHP code that’s running the system out of memory, more likely than not an infinite loop of some sort.
ozzy
For fixing the “Allowed memory size”-problem, go to your wp-settings.php and change to the following at the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT directive (You probably have 32 there):
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
Steeplejack
Haven’t read the thread yet (which I will), but I have been wanting to weigh in on the WordPress and/or “new server” issue for a while. I have only minimal experience with WordPress, and that was a couple of years back, but I am a programmer with long and bitter experience in Web-based database mangling (mostly ColdFusion on top of Microsoft Sequel Server).
Obviously I don’t have access to the Balloon Juice traffic logs to see if the number of daily site visitors has spiked enormously in the past few months, but, if that’s not the case, I think it’s premature to be looking at a new server. It’s always tempting to throw hardware at a problem, and it’s axiomatic that you can never have too much hardware, but from what I have read here over the past few months I think most, if not all, of the problems are with WordPress (and/or possibly with the underlying database–I presume MySQL?), and a new server would only spackle over the dry rot and delay the day of reckoning. And $500 a month is a steep investment for any blog.
If a client came to me with this problem, I would try to fix the WordPress problems–or at least clearly identify exactly what they are–before recommending a new server. Nothing worse than getting the client to drop a big chunk of change and then finding that the problems are still there–just occurring faster and more efficiently (heh).
Okay, will read the thread now. My apologies if I restated the bleedingly obvious or missed some late-breaking development.
Aziz Poonawalla
I second the call to Wiki-ize it. Alternatively, set up a dedicated blog, and have each blog post title be the actual term, with the description as the blog post body. Then people can leave comments on each word/post which will be raw material for refining teh definitions. thats the simplest way to do it (and will give the best Google mojo also, bonus)
Cris
Jeebus, no wonder you’re bitter.
(I agree with everything Steeplejack says, by the way.)
Steeplejack
@Cris:
Well, the recurring nightmares have mostly stopped, so there’s that. I have been studying up on Ruby and hope to get off the meds soon.
Bryant
For fixing the “Allowed memory size”-problem, go to your wp-settings.php and change to the following at the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT directive (You probably have 32 there):
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);
Don’t do that in wp-settings.php — that’ll get overwritten when you upgrade WordPress. Do it in wp-config.php, which you’ve probably edited already anyhow. You can put:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);Right beneath the line that says, say:
define ('WPLANG', '');This is not guaranteed to work, depending on the settings of your hosting provider, but it’s a good first thing to try.
(Welcome to the hell of technical people arguing about troubleshooting measures in your comments. It’s one of the Thousand Hells of Chinese legend, I think.)
Bryant
Oh god, don’t cut and paste that. WordPress did bad things to the single-quotes. Try this:
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');sidereal
If the 8 previous programmers who offered their services don’t work out, you can e-mail me. I deal with exactly this shizzle 10 times a day and am willing to do it pro bono. Which is to say I’m willing to do it in exchange for an autographed picture of Bono.
Anne Laurie
Welcome to my world for the past 10 days, Tim. When WP started locking me out of the Lexicon EDIT, I actually saved a no-pix version of the whole thing to WordPad just in case, but fortunately we don’t need to use that (yet). There may have been some progress made by the servergods, since the FATAL ERROR message has changed lines now:
It’s been Line 1524 since the end of September for me. Perhaps someone more competent can tell us what this portends?
demimondian
@Anne Laurie: I don’t know about *competent* — the powers that be Do Not let me touch the production servers, for fear that the terrorists win.
However, the interesting fact that 33554432 is 32 megabytes, and that the page is getting pretty beefy, suggests that increasing the memory limit for the wordpress process might play an important role in recovering…
Steeplejack
@sidereal:
Pro bono.
Heh.
The Golux
This may be an inappropriate place to post this, but I don’t see any place in the Lexicon for suggestions…
For the entry “This is excellent news for…”, I think there should be some mention of commenter “idiotic” at TPM, who during the Democratic primaries relentlessly said of any development that favored Obama, “This is excellent news!!! For Hillary!!!!” This certainly predates the usage by McCain
The Golux
Erm, that’s supposed to end with “…usage by McCain supporters.” Also, WordPress ate my punctuation: In idiotic’s quote, there should be (two or more) exclamation points after the word “news”, and at least three after “Hillary”.
shinshoryuken
@Moderators
Please read and delete:
When posting an error message, don’t include ‘/home//’ directory listings, as that gives away a username for your server. Replace the username with XXXX when posting to avoid security exploits.
-shinshoryuken