Riding the 404 Express
Posted on May 16, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
While the site is up, a quick note: My host for Scalzi.com appears to be having some issues with some of its Linux servers today, including the one this site is on. So the site has been down intermittently today. Presumably they will get this fixed, but if you drop by and you can’t see the site, well, now you know why.
(Not that you’ll be able to see this if the site is down, right? Wrong! Because so many of you clever, clever people have the Whatever on your RSS feeds.)
Anyway, if the site is down, don’t panic. It’ll be back. I’m not being DoSed or anything.
This is of course a fine reminder for me to backup the Whatever. I usually do this by simply saving the monthly archive html pages, but isn’t there a program that will save the complete site for me automatically? If there is, someone let me know what it is, please.
Launch your Mac’s terminal program and type “man wget”.
Launch your Mac’s terminal program and type “man wget”.
Better yet — “man rsync”.
Okay, is there a way to do it that doesn’t involve me opening up a terminal program and getting the feeling I’ve been transported to 1994 and my clumsy, fumblling attempts to use UNIX?
For what it’s worth, my web-based RSS browser (Bloglines) says that the Whatever feed isn’t up.
Okay, is there a way to do it that doesn’t involve me opening up a terminal program and getting the feeling I’ve been transported to 1994 and my clumsy, fumblling attempts to use UNIX?
Heh heh. I’m glad I’m not the only one who is wondering if we are going backwards sometimes in computer usability. in the development world we seem to have an odd combination of very cool new tools and very primitive command line functions with a gazillion parameters.
Strangely enough If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat (not just the reader) you can use that to capture whole web sites.
Since you’re using Movable Type, just go to your administrative pages and use the Import/Export function. If things go wonky and you want to restore, you can re-import your latest version. As an added benefit, most blogging tools can import the MT format.
Yeah, but I find the export option is pretty wonky — it won’t save all the entries from the site and messes up most of the comments, too.
Okay, is there a way to do it that doesn’t involve me opening up a terminal program and getting the feeling I’ve been transported to 1994 and my clumsy, fumblling attempts to use UNIX?
[Cue up “Feels like the first time”…]
I know nuffin’ about Movable Type, but from your 404 page, I can see that you’re on 1and1, so you can use phpMyAdmin to back up the database to your home machine. That takes care of the content, at least, and it should be easy enough to install MT and re-load the Whatever content in case the worst happens.
Ah, that’s right. And that’s just what I did.
John — I’ve been considering setting up a non-academic web page this summer, and have been looking at 1and1. If you’re using them, would you give a thumbs up or down on them? If you don’t mind my asking…
Dr. Phil
Notwithstanding today’s little outage, I’ve been very happy with them so far and would recommend them.
You could open up your terminal and make it translucent, and that would only bring you back to 2002 or so.
wget -m -nc http://www.scalzi.com
will copy every linked file from scalzi.com to to a subdirectory in your current directory.
Bloglines is still saying that you XML feed is screwed up. Any ideas?
Nope. I haven’t done anything new to the site. However, I’ll do an overall rebuild and see if that helps.
The rebuild worked!! Bloglines is seeing the feed fine now.