Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

Over the weekend, I had some technical problems with my other blog, New York Traveler.net. The comments features on the blog were totally unoperational. A day previously, I had updated the Akismet plugin (Akismet is a software plugin that traps spam comments on blogs). I couldn’t be sure that the Akismet plugin was related to my problems, because I had updated it on my other blog and the comments were working fine. It was totally baffling.

After going through the usual recourse (disabling plugins one at a time, changing the blog theme, searching forums), I finally called my web host, Bluehost. The first call was a disaster: the technician said he couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so goodbye. :-p If you’re wondering why so many bloggers are leaving Bluehost, that’s probably a good reason right there.

But I called again, because I had discovered some odd language in my error logs, at my cPanel for Bluehost. You’d think the technician would have checked the logs?! Is he too busy watching his HDTV show or something?! Well, I read over the error logs and saw that for some reason, comments were being regarded as “duplicate content.” I couldn’t decode the language, so I called and talked with a gentleman named John. Wow, was he courteous and helpful! John looked at the error log and said that perhaps my blog needed a little housecleaning. He said blog databases sometimes get full of various extra stuff (blogs are extremely flexible, because so much happens with them- posting, drafting, commenting, moderating comments, etc). John said that sometimes all you have to do is a little database repair– and this is as easy as clicking a button for the process to go automatically.

Every cPanel is a little different for every host, so I can’t begin to address all the variables here. But know that if something has just suddenly gone awry, consider repairing and/or optimizing your database. A call to your host’s tech support can help you find out how to do this. For me, I just had to go to my cPanel’s database wizard, and click “repair database.” It took less than 10 seconds. And guess what? PROBLEM SOLVED!!! Thanks, John!