Between Christmas and New Year Journalxtra was deluged by an amazing coincidence of IT cock-ups that put JournalXtra flat on its back. If I didn’t know better I would say JournalXtra and its server enjoyed a week of drink fuelled mayhem [aka a piss-up, in the British English vernacular].
The JournalXtra Christmas party began with a monitor outage Christmas Eve, progressed with a corrupt site cache and ended with a drunken database that couldn’t tell its posts from its pages.
The passwords to JournalXtra and the server are on the computer with the broken monitor and someone, i.e. me, forgot to create a password file backup. Being locked out of the site we were unable to reset the website cache, which is timed to automatically reset every 7 days. Being locked out of the server we were unable to fix the database.
The outcome of all the above was a slow loading website that displayed text within its HTML framework without any CSS style or JS enhancements.
We learned our lesson: we created a USB backup of our user credentials and we moved JournalXtra to its own server space to maximise its resource allowances.
JournalXtra is now back in the land of the sober and ready to share its guides to WordPress, web development and Linux to whoever visits us.
Christmas 2014 and New Year’s Day 2015 have been fun for all of us at JournalXtra. We hope you had a good Christmas and we wish you a steady 2015. God willing, may you achieve some of your dreams in the year ahead.