The Silent Room

Let me tell you what happened.

I was trying to enable WordPress to display Asian characters on EMiNA’s blog, and I found out that this is easily done. Just open your wp-config.php and change a few lines. Look for these two lines;

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

You can either delete them or put a ‘//’ before each line [turning them into comments]. I downloaded the config.php, made the changes and it worked for EMiNA. So I figured I’d do the same for this blog. Being the careless doofus that I was, I simply uploaded EMiNA’s config.php to this blog, without creating a backup for this one.

Now that’s a cue for you to go ‘OH SHI-’.

I soon discovered that due incompatible keys in the config file, this installation of WordPress can no longer read its own database. Thinking that I had no backup, I contacted my webhost admins, and they too didn’t have an earlier backup I could use! I was in despair for a while, but I decided to worry about it later since I have an assignment that was due earlier this morning.

I came back just now and decided to see how I could fix it, and wonder of wonders, I found a backup of the entire WordPress folder on my PC! So I restored that config file and thankfully now this blog is running again. Moral of the story: before you do shit, BACK YOUR SHIT UP.