Forum Moderators: phranque
Can you see what's coming yet?
I added a new redirect line to htaccess-A. Then, I uploaded the updated file to the correct directory, right? Suddenly, all my SSI navigation menus were gone. I freaked. I opened htaccess-A again, to make sure I hadn't altered the AddHandler line that controls the SSI. Nope... the line was still there. So I uploaded the .htaccess file to the correct directory again... Still no navigation menus.
My web host must have changed their server configuration somehow! My AddHandler line must not work anymore! I called my webhost (who's also an ISP) and got one of their regular tech support guys... who knows a lot about configuring a home dialup internet account, but knows nothing about servers and SSI or anything.
I demanded to speak to someone who had access to their server configuration. Nobody was available. I was pretty darn irate. Mr. Tech Support promised to have one of their server admins call me back at home after 7:30 (I was about to go home at the end of a nice long day at work when the menus disappeared). Nobody ever called. I assumed they had fixed the problem.
I checked the site at home in the morning. Still no menus. I called the host again. Got another tech support guy. I remained relatively calm this time. He called an admin, and called me back. I downloaded htaccess-A from the server (since I don't keep a backup copy of the site at home), at Mr. Tech Support #2's request. Ooops.
Somehow, two or three times in a row yesterday, I'd edited htaccess-A and then uploaded htaccess-B in its place. Thereby losing my custom 404 page and my navigation menus, AND simultaneously banning Googlebot from my entire site, AND blaming the poor blameless tech support guys at my host for not being able to help.
I apologised profusely. The tech support guy said he understood, no problem. I said I feel really bad for the guy I spoke to yesterday though... I was really upset then... We figured out who it was I spoke to yesterday. I apologized again. The tech support guy said, sympathetically "I'd never want to be a webadmin."
LOL... yeah, tough job I have! Oh the weight of the virtual world upon my shoulders, eh? :)
Anyone else care to share any stupid oversights, mistakes or other webmastering blunders? It would make me feel better! :)
My former host once was having problems with their email server and fowarded all of my emails to somebody else (God knows who). Now that's a real stupid mistake!
At one time I had a bad habit of using "capitals" at the beginning of all "Keywords" when searching and doing Keyword research. This was when AV was a real SE and no one had heard of Goto. I built a site that was mainly targeting AV, so this is where I did most of my research.
Yep, you guessed it!! The whole site was built and submitted before I realized what happened. I blamed AV for changing their algo, it couldn't possibly had been me, after all my careful rearch :).
I loaded their index.html in my main directory and overwrote my main index.html.
I became aware of it after I had no inquires after several days!
Yikes . .
Yipe! Nothing personal, I hope...
Kinda reminds me of the person who kept calling my house leaving important sounding messages for someone else. After the third message, I returned their call to tell them they had the wrong number...
it couldn't possibly had been me, after all my careful rearch
Oh, heavens no! Us [big]Webmasters[/big] (sound reverent trumpets here) NEVER make stupid mistakes. LOL
I'm just glad I'm not a surgeon... "What, you mean I re-attached the diseased liver, and threw the perfectly good transplant organ away? Oopsie."
Using a subdirectory of my site...
Ooh. I do the same thing. I'll have to watch for that one next time I'm working on a client's site... ;) After yesterday, I wouldn't put any file-swapping errors past myself.
Yeah check Foo. I managed to start TWO posts, not just one, which is pretty embarrasing.
>I loaded their index.html in my main directory and overwrote my main index.html.
Also my speciality! ;)
I overwrote all my newly translated Japanese webpages with the English versions.
The neighbour's two year old daughter decided to give our pet c o c k a t o o (parrot) the floppy disk containing the Japanese translations.
My server's daily backup files didn't help either. They were already overwritten with the wrong pages. After this stuff-up I setup cron jobs for daily, weekly and monthly backups to different directories to recover from other stuff-ups.
My Japanese staff member and translator was on a plane travelling to Japan to do sales and marketing for me. Fortuantely he had the Japanese translations and website on his notebook computer.
Edited by: Gorufu
Oh, lucky, lucky! I've got another good goof-up in the "Importance of Customer Service" thread... During our big update, I overwrote the "View your Shopping Cart/Check Out" page with the "Print This Page As Your Receipt" page... leaving no-one any way of actually checking out.
A customer emailed to tell me about that one, and of course, I had no back-up of the original Check Out page handy, so I had to rebuild it.
Similar thing here... once when working on my shopping cart, I set it to print orders to a file rather than send the actual order. Of course, when I uploaded, I forgot to switch back to sending the orders, so each order was printed to the test file, overwriting the previous order.
This was on a Friday afternoon and I lost a full weekend of orders...
Needless to say, I've learnt from that error - I now avoid doing anything of note on a Friday :)
I think I'll make a note of that one... the shopping cart error happened on a Monday, but the .htaccess screw up was an uploaded-the-file-five-minutes-before-leaving-work-on-Friday incident. :)
