Sunday, December 14, 2008

I came in to work on Friday morning to find that my database had reverted back to Thursday morning. I was kind of pissed. I checked my e-mail and found 180 e-mail messages from my web server telling me that it couldn't connect to the database... My webhost says they had a power outage for 30 minutes during a system backup and had to revert to the previous days database backup and couldn't get the old information for me. Not only that, but I submitted my problem ticket at 7am and didn't get a response until 4pm. I think I might be looking for a new webhost... Anyway, they said they're going to give me a free month. I think I'm going to start manually backing up the database everyday after I make my final news entries.

So now I had 2 whole days of lost data (I didn't post any news on Friday just in case they could restore the old database). That's about 4 hours of work and I just don't have the time for that. I spent yesterday adding a feature that's been nagging at me for a while. Until now I was manually cutting and pasting all of the press release information into my content management script. This meant that every press release took 2-3 minutes to format and add into the system. So on Saturday I programmed a page parser for my top top press release sources. What used to take 2-3 minutes is now completed by one click :) It's pretty sweet. I'm going to program the same functionality for the web articles using their RSS feeds but I think that will ahve to wait until next weekend because it's going to be a little more involved and require me to set up another database table. Yeay! Good thing is that those don't take very long to get through in the morning so they can wait.