Blog move & WordPress white screen

No, I haven’t crossed the river yet. Rather, this is the view from my new kitchen window.

Not dead yet, but I can see how you might wonder. Sometime last night the blog just up and disappeared. When you – or I – tried to look at it, only a white page came up, without even a source code.

This is because my entire Chaosnode.net was moved from one internal server to another in the Dreamhost server farm. They probably have good reasons for this, but it broke WordPress in a couple places. Actually they documented this and much more in their wiki, which they linked to in the emails they sent me before and after the move. But because it took some hours before it broke visibly, I did not read that wiki entry until after I had tried pretty much everything else I could think of.

Basically, there is a change in the internal file structure that supports my site. In the past, there was an invisible folder between the root level and my site. Â Instead of /home/chaosnod/chaosnode.net, it said /home/.calliopey/chaosnod etc. I don’t know or care what calliopey was (obviously it was somehow named after the mythical Calliope) and your server may vary. In any case, WordPress had thoughtfully included this path in a php file, likewise in the upload folder path.

So this is all very technical but the point is, when I fixed this, everything was intact. Also, I now have a backup of the whole blog folder on my removable hard disk. So something good came of it, although I lost a couple hours of my precious lifetime that I might otherwise have spent writing fiction about a high school chess player. An imaginary high school chess player, obviously, with no similarity whatsoever to any high school chess players you may have read about in the news over the last couple years. Actually it is more inspired by Japanese sports anime.

Happy new year – not that a single day passes that is not brand new. At least I learned something new today!

2 thoughts on “Blog move & WordPress white screen

  1. That sure is a big river, very close to your house. You’re sure it doesn’t flood in such a way as to cause you trouble? If it doesn’t, COOL! It’s beautiful. If it does, EEK!

    • I would not worry about flooding, although this is surely why the house has two stories and no basement. But if it has stood since the Great Depression (and it certainly feels like it) then it will probably do fine for the five years I have signed up for.

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