As probably no one noticed, my site was down for… Days. I don’t actually know how long! I haven’t been back on here for probably a few weeks, not even just to see how cool it is that I have a website. It could’ve been down for that entire duration.
Maybe it’s not the most secure thing to admit, but I don’t know much about self-hosting. I barely feel comfortable poking around command line, have never been responsible for a server before, haven’t ever touched MySQL or PHP before, and… probably never used even free WordPress before making this blog. So… to suddenly be getting error messages from both ends of this thing was fucking stressful and confusing as hell. I currently have the most tabs open that I’ve ever had open at once on this computer. It’s *all* for database troubleshooting.
Did I fix it? Hardly. I rebooted the server and it’s working again for the time being. It’s a fucking relief to be able to do something, since I don’t understand 90% of the things I’m trying to read, and I spent at least two hours going through and carefully attempting troubleshooting measures. (And that’s after opening more tabs to understand how to even begin to attempt those troubleshooting measures, since it seems like most people who have these types of problems already know what the fuck they’re doing with administrative privileges on a server and don’t need to actually explain how to perform those steps.)
If I were a real blogger, I’d organize my fuck ton of tabs into a coherent how-to so that other people with similar levels of ignorance would maybe not need to slog by themselves quite as much as I did… but this is more of a test post than anything.