“Well??????” – A Tale of High Geekery

It was a webmaster’s worst nightmare, and it wouldn’t go away.

I’d had less than four hours sleep each night last week, working on the new FarrFeed, and was ready to crash early. All Sunday evening, I’d been trying to figure out the PHP code for making a block of text appear on just one particular page of the new site. It was a puzzle I felt I could solve, and I had almost managed it: in my frustration, on one of my last attempts, I’d written the custom_functions.php file to make the word “Well??????” appear. Finally it did, but on every page, not just the one in question. Arghh.

It was 11:30 p.m., there were two inches of fresh unwanted snow outside, and I was exhausted. Vowing to pursue the matter further the next day, I deleted the code I’d just added — so the “Well??????” would disappear — then visited the weather page to see if spring was ever going to come. Not anytime soon, apparently, and I returned to my test site (hidden behind a password during the development stage). AAGHHH! The “Well??????” was STILL THERE!

That was impossible, of course. How could it be there when I’d taken it down? I was in the Twilight Zone of webmastery. Easy does it, I told myself, checking and rechecking, but it was still there, on every page. I checked the source code to see if “Well??????” was there and where it was, written plain as day into the dynamically-generated page, but not inside any “div”!

In layman’s terms, it didn’t exist, yet there it was: this was like staring at a ghost and having it throw a pie in my face.

None of this made any sense, but I wondered if my earlier experiments had somehow injected (?) or written the test word into a file and corrupted it. Bewildered, I uploaded and overwrote every single WordPress and Thesis file I could find: nothing helped, “Well??????” was still there. Finally, in desperation, I imported all the posts and comments from the other blog (this one), all over again. This was a partial database transfer and risky in itself, but extreme measures were called for. Naturally, it didn’t work.

By now it was almost 3:00 a.m. I knew that if I went to bed with the new site in this condition, I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I decided to look at the actual database itself. Databases are like dark mysteries to me. I don’t know the first thing about them, but I have used mySQL to take a look around, and that’s what I did once more…

What the hell WAS all this stuff? So many options, all of them with unpredictable consequences that might take my my whole day on Monday. I saw a link marked “refresh” but didn’t click it, and then I found “search.” The search window had 14 choices I didn’t understand, but one I did: a blank field where I could enter an actual word. I typed in “Well??????” and got ONE HIT!

I drilled down into the database tables. I didn’t know what a database table was, but I was inside of one. Finally I isolated an item with the actual “Well??????” just sitting there, in plain English amidst all the weirdness — and there was an “edit” option! Not daring to hope, I clicked on that, and a tiny text box opened with “Well??????” in it. Yes, I could highlight it. I did so and hit my delete key, whereupon it vanished. Yeah, right. From the mySQL interface, sure.

But when I hopped back to the new FarrFeed, the “Well??????” was gone! Glory hallejua, I could go to bed.

That was six hours ago. Unfortunately, it’s past 9:30 a.m. now, and I got up at 8:00. Oh man —

And the woodpile is covered with fresh snow…