Normal Service Resumed

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to use the Sciencetext site over the last 12 hours or so…we had problems.

I spotted the first sign of trouble when I checked the Sciencetext stats this morning and noticed that aside from the homepage they had flatlined. A quick click on the current story spewed up a generic 404 error page, not even my custom 404 page. Something was amiss.

I have installed a couple of new Wordpress plugins this week and disabled some others, so I reverted those, but the 404 was still showing. Something else.

Next step, check the permalinks setting in Wordpress settings? Nope, that’s fine too. The Wordpress cache was empty, which only confirmed the stats, no one had visited any posts or pages overnight.

Last place to look, first place I should’ve checked – the site’s .htaccess file. This Apache configuration file controls how your site’s server responds to visitors. Somehow, and it wasn’t me, ‘onest, guv, the Wordpress specific chunk of code had gone AWOL. This is what you should have in the .htaccess in your Wordpress folder:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

It’s back in now, and all is well again. Phew.

Finally, I checked the Google cache and Google Webmaster Tools, nothing awry there, the search engine hadn’t spidered the site overnight, so won’t even be aware that anything untoward had happened.