Sometimes efforts to perform routine maintenance go awry. And sometimes backups don’t have all that they’re supposed to have in them . But no matter, thank God through Jesus Christ I’m saved by grace. And to boot the blog is working again. I was able to get all the posts back after some DB maintenance really messed things up. But it seems some of them have an odd character where quotes used to be. And I was able to get most comments back, up till 9/17/2008. Unfortunately my more recent backup failed to include some more recent comments. It’s all a long story, but bottom line is all posts are back and most comments too. I’m still working on getting the comments after 9/17/2008 till now back. Till I’m done getting those comments back, probably NOT a good idea to make any new comments . I’ll update this post when you can make comments again. But any new comments made at the moment might be permanently lost when I get the others restored. For now, enjoy reading .

update 9/24/2008 11:45PM: Finally got all the comments back and also was able to get rid of those odd looking characters that were showing up. Here’s a note for you who backup your own Wordpress database to a .sql file. Before restoring, open the file in Notepad and save it with ANSI encoding. That’s how I got rid of the odd characters and was much easier than other options. And regarding your backups, make sure you’re using Wordpress recommended backup options. (MySQL DB restore tools [in phpMyAdmin] use UTF8 and that’s the option to select in the restore file character type, but somehow if the file is not saved as ANSI encoded, the odd characters show up, because the DB or the DB backup process or Wordpress does something odd with the encoding of text.)

So all is back to as it was yesterday, praise the Lord.