As my faithful, non-existant readers may have noticed, Chemical Shift was down the past couple of days.
Apparently, WordPress was causing excessive usage of the MySQL database in which nearly everything on this site is contained. I think it was because it was bombarded with spam comments between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Every couple of days, I typically have one to twenty spam comments that the Akismet spam catcher plug-in collects, but the last time I checked to empty it, I had 490!
I had to email my hosting provider at least four to five times to get a definite answer as to why the database wasn’t connecting right. Once they told me, they said I would have to upgrade to a much more expensive account, which I thought was really unnecessary since I don’t get that much traffic.
I was able to get them to backup the database, so that I could retrieve my most recent posts and site changes, specifically those since my previous backup. The format the database was in had some unusual lines in it, so I had to go through and manually comment those out to import the data back into MySQL. I then had trouble retrieving the data to WordPress, so I decided to upgrade to the latest version, 2.0.5. I did a fresh install to a blank database, imported the data, turned the necessary plug-ins off then on, then loaded a couple new plug-ins: WP-Cache2 and WordPress 2.0.5 Tuneup.
The cache plug-in should cut down on MySQL usage since the most viewed pages will be loaded into a cache and stored as static files. The tuneup plug-in fixes an error 500 bug that cropped up in the latest release of WordPress.