Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water

badday.jpgSo there I was, resting on my laurels, feeling pretty darned pleased with myself and my way cool install of Movable Type that I did ALL BY MYSELF with no help from anyone! Yesiree, I was pretty hot stuff, in my own mind at least. Then yesterday I was rebuilding the blog and got the following message:

An error occurred:
Can’t use an undefined value as a SCALAR reference at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 2204
Use of uninitialized value in substr at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 49.

Uh-oh! This didn’t sound good. I tried rebuilding, same message. So I emailed MT support and they got back to me pretty quickly with some really bad news: the blog’s database was corrupted. Okay, so I took a little shorcut when I did that all-by-myself install after we moved to Dreamhost. So I should have used MySQL and not BerkeleyDB. So shoot me. Actually, shoot the blog because it was dead, kaput, kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!. *sigh* MT suggested I see if Dreamhost could restore a backup version, but I decided that since I had srewed things up from the start, it was better to begin again and let MT do it this time from scratch. So I bit the bullet, paid my $60, and let them have at it, this time using MySQL. By 2pm this afternoon, I was back in (stable) action, and restored (most of) the blog from a backup done in early Feb right before the last disaster (unfortunately, due to the database corruption, I couldn’t export the entries to get the past few weeks of postings), and have spent the last couple of hours restoring everything else from the archives that I retrieved before all heck broke loose. Argh!!!!!

Tags: