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HELP WANTED: Computer Nerd Type Stuff.

Longtime readers of WILLisms.com will recall that about three weeks ago, WILLisms.com melted down right during a huge traffic surge (which was apparently completely coincidental and had nothing to do with the meltdown), and right as I was leaving town for a long weekend.

I paid the movabletype people 60 dollars to reinstall the program, because the original Berkeley database had been corrupted (what that even means, I have no idea). That's how computer illiterate I am when it comes to the coding type of jargon.
I would give the movabletype people many thumbs down, incidentally, but I won't go into that now.

Well, from that meltdown, I am still having residual problems you may have noticed. The index will go blank when I get a trackback or comment spam sent to the old movabletype platform, which still co-exists somehow out there with my new version of movabletype. I've know this would cause the problem all along, but for some reason, the movabletype people convinced me it shouldn't matter.

I don't know where it is, how to access it, why the old database would still have the power to mess up my site, and so on.

So in addition to the comments and searches having some issues with style, my site goes quasi-down several times a day.

A simple 10-second index file rebuild fixes it, so it's not the end of the world. But I may not check the site for hours in the meantime.

I finally figured out the problem (cause - effect) because of a recent surge in trackback and comment spam (mostly from poker sites) to the old platform, but I am not skilled or knowledgeable enough to fix it. I have tried getting into FTP, but it's all a bunch of nonsense to me.

My mediatemple.net server people are very helpful, but they aren't really able to do anything about this. Staci of Sekimori site design tried to explain what I needed to do, but she might as well been speaking on tongues. I probably am more computer literate than 99% of America, but this stuff is just jibberish to me.

Does anyone know about this stuff? It seems like an easy fix if you know what you are doing, but I have not heard back from the web types I have emailed about this. Help would be appreciated. If it's a bigger fix than I am thinking, I will even pay. If you have a referral of someone, even, let me know. I need to get this fixed, once and for all.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy finding fun stats, and ideas. I enjoy creating cool pictures, neat graphs, neat tables, etc. I enjoy original reporting and having the freedom to write about anything I want.

I don't enjoy the computer programming side of this. At all. In fact, I hate the computer jargon. Hate it. I've spent way too much time dealing with it lately. And computer nerds who do know this stuff are the least helpful people in the world, even when they are trying to be helpful.

So any help or referral would be appreciated.

UPDATE:

Just happened again, no more than 10 minutes after I posted this. It is the same spammer, and I have no power to ban his IP address, because he's not even sending the pings to my real site. Very frustrating.

UPDATE 2:

And again. I am hoping to have this fixed ASAP, but if nobody can read this message, that's a little difficult, isn't it?

UPDATE 3:

Okay, fingers crossed, but I think it's good to go now. For now, at least.

Posted by Will Franklin · 21 June 2005 07:40 AM

Comments

Posted by: Zsa Zsa at June 21, 2005 12:41 PM

Posted by: James at June 21, 2005 12:51 PM