Resurrected

Well, that had us all worried didn’t it?
Although it’s well known that Witches float when attempts are made to drown them, I must say, I never thought I’d ever see this version of BW again… or, indeed, in the worst night hours, even be able to rescue any of my old entries or pictures… I honestly thought that almost 24 years of my life, chronicled over several thousand hours, had disappeared forever.
So, what happened?
Mid-week last week I remember half-hearing on the news that there were PHP problems worldwide.
Beyond “I think there’s some PHP in BW“, I didn’t really think very much of it until I got a text on Sunday from an ex-blogger friend asking how we were coping with Storm Boelo and what was up with my blog. At that time I couldn’t see the site (all I got was a blank page and a file with a short alphanumeric string attempting to download), but I could still get into the back-end and the CMS (posting page and comments management) and the RSS feed were still working.
I hoped that the situation might sort itself out overnight, but on Monday morning the front page was still disappeared and still trying instead to download a sinister-looking file.
I packed Mr BW off to his annual week-long residential woodcarving course and then emailed my hosting company, who I have hosted with for over 23 years and who Mr BW hosted with for 7, to ask for some help.
The first person was unsympathetic and told me it was my old code’s fault and, “Unfortunately we would not be able to fix this for you in this instance.” I emailed again and the second lady tried to help but actually made things worse as her interventions managed to lock me out from everything. I asked her to reverse what she had done, and she said she had, but nothing changed and I was still unable to access any part of my CMS, and the RSS reader feed disappeared too, with just a 403 appearing on all the pages I tried to load:
“Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /mt/mt.cgi on this server.
Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at www.blue-witch.co.uk Port 80”
She then told me that my code was just too old to work with the new PHP patches and “As
the CMS is really outdated, we can’t offer any more support on the issue, I’m afraid.”
I replied to that and, late on Monday afternoon, I was lucky enough to chance on a third support person who said he’d try to get something loading. At this point I thought there might be just a tiny glimmer of hope that I might at least be able to get into the CMS to somehow salvage my entries and image files.
I replied and stressed that I understood how busy they must be due to the PHP issues and that there was no hurry as I couldn’t do anything to update the site to WordPress until MrBW gets back from his course at the weekend.
Late afternoon today my phone rang. I recognised the code as Manchester and almost didn’t answer as in the last couple of weeks I have been getting a lot of AI generated spam calls. I’m glad I did answer though as it was the lovely man from my hosting company who’d picked up my email late on Monday. He told me he had spent a lot of time today forensically going through my .htaccess file and ‘commenting out’ some bits and researching how to change other bits so that it will work with the new PHP.
So… big huge ginormous thanks to Senior Support Technician Dean at 34sp who has gone above and beyond in working out that the issues were with the deprecated ‘ereg’ needing to be changed to the new function ‘preg_match’. I am so grateful to him for taking the time and trouble to help when others of his colleagues didn’t.
And so I came back from the dead.
I honestly thought that I had lost nearly 24 years of my life history and that it was irrecoverable because the old code was simply collapsed by last week’s global PHP problems, making everything inaccessible forever.
I’ve known that day was coming for ages (and have spoken of it here many times), and Mr BW and I have frequently discussed installing WordPress and then attempting to transfer over 7,000 entries and 42,000 comments, but the task was just too scary to think about and then, after we moved North, we were so busy with builders and selling houses, that it never got to the top of the list. It has now! In the next couple of weeks I shall hopefully appear in a new dress, provided the code shop sells the appropriate shade of BW Blue and that we can get the dress to fit properly.
I might then be able to get back to posting more regularly again as, this year particularly, knowing that I was living on borrowed time, I haven’t been inclined to spend time putting together posts that I knew in my heart of hearts would all disappear in the not too distant future (in a “least time spent, least time wasted” sort of way).
And many many thanks to all of you who have answered my desperate pleas for assistance, offered practical help and advice, and soothing words over the last few days.