System Administration: Wiki voodoo

System Administration: Wiki voodoo

If you accessed my blog between 8.30pm and 9pm (GMT + 1) you might have noticed that I was using a different theme, that was due to a (not so) voodoo experience I had with snipsnap. But here is what happened...

It all starts two days ago when I messed a bit with some CSS files of the theme I'm using, Blue Life. I did some changes, but even If i was saving the files changes weren't being applied, since it wasn't something mandatory I reverted the modifications and just dropped the subject.

I had no problem, until...
Today I was updating some of the macros I have in snipsnap. When you update macros you have to restart snipsnap server, otherwise the macros won't be available. So as usual I restarted, it takes about 10 seconds… so it's no big deal.
The big deal actually started when I accessed it to try out the new macros and I had no styles on the page. As you can imagine I wasn't pleased.

I first tried to select another theme and then select again Blue Life, just in case, with no luck. Also taking out the new macros, we never know if they were messing up something. But they weren't the source of the problem.
Time was passing and I had to move fast, this is no corporate page, but I don't like to show my servers with problems!
Took me a couple of minutes to recall that two days ago I had been messing with CSS files, I thought I had reverted all the changes..but I definitely had missed something. I have snipsnap on my laptop, so I checked both CSS files and guess what...they were equal! (This is the voodoo part of the post)

By now www.pabrantes.net was running with another theme, just in case any visitors would show up. I didn't want to show them a sloppy unstylish page! laugh

Anyway I had another idea (after all, it would be bad If I hadn't) I went to my laptop's snipsnap and exported the snips. Then edited the XML file and erased every snip except the ones from Blue Life theme.

I then exported all my blog, imported it within a new snipsnap instance running on my laptop. Has I was expecting Blue Life stopped working in that snipsnap instance, I was now sure that something was wrong with the snips. I then imported the exported blue life's snips, and voilá! It worked!

I then repeated did the process again but in my main snipsnap server, refreshed and Blue Life was back to www.pabrantes.net!

What's my point here?
Sometimes when you think that everything is ok, a failure is waiting for you to trip in it. If I hadn't restarted the server I probably wouldn't have had this problem. Imagine that only in 2 months I would restart the server due to updates or something… I probably wouldn't remember that I had been messing with the CSS files. Although in this case, it was a pretty straightforward problem - since it had to be CSS - most of the times it's not...
...those are the bad days for the administrators!