TheSelfStarters.com

I read somewhere that an internet marketeer was so caught up with trouble shooting and solving his technical problems that his product launch was delayed. He said it’s better to let the technical guys handle technical problems rather than ourselves. Well that’s true, I know how it felt like trying to solve my own computer or website related problems.

However when you have no one to turn too, then we really do not have a choice. Take for example my recent experience. My host servers broke down making one of my blog non existence. Every thing is gone, however I have got a back up of the blog in my PC. The problem is I never know how to restore it. My blog made use of WordPress and I was determined to restore the blog. I went searching for answers in the internet. I did find the answers I wanted, however when I followed the steps mentioned, my blog was not showing up. Now this is when the frustration start, you read the steps again and again, you tried again and again, still you get the error page.

Well after a couple of hours I finally manage to restore the blog and this is what I learnt.

The restoration steps said that if it is a new installation (like my case) you need to create a new database. However there’s more to it than creating the database. I learnt (by understanding the error message), you also need to add a user to the database too. And the user to be added is to be the same as the user in the wpconfig.php. Get this wrong and you will get the connecting to database error.

Likewise when you create the new database, the name has to be the same as the database name in the wpconfig file. This you need to take note of because when you are with a new host they will give you a new user name and this user name formed part of the database name you create. If you can’t create the database with the same file name as in the wpconfig file then just go ahead and create the database. After that you then need to edit the information in the wpconfig.php file. Luckily wpconfig is not a large file and the first 4 lines are what you required. This is where you can find the important information like, the database name, user name, password and host. The host part need not be touched.

Creating the database and adding user and pass word is done in the cpannel. There is a MySQL icon there, click on it and you will get an MySQL account maintenance page to do the work. Once the database, user is correctly done, uploading the back up database ( this is a text file) is a breeze. Just use PHPmyAdmin which is located at the end of the MySQL account maintenance page. For the steps, just follow the instruction found on this website

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/restore/#one

Well I believe that’s all about it. If every thing is done right, you get to see your wordpress blog.

However I encountered another problem. well the database error message is gone but when I load my blog, a blank page appeared instead. A BLANK page with white space and nothing at all. I tried to see the source file and even the source file turned out empty. However I am able to login to the Wp dashboard through the WP-Admin directory and found that all my post are intact, thus this means the database is not the problem anymore.

I then recalled one time one of my other blogs had the same problem because of a bad plugin I used. However I never had plugin problem for this blog and anyway I was thinking why not deactivate all of them to see if this can isolate the problem. When I went to the plugin page, I found that there isn’t any plugins at all. All my plugins are gone. So I quickly checked the plugin folder and discovered that it was empty. I then checked the theme folder and it was empty too. So now I realized that my restoration was not complete as the two folder were empty.

I then restore again but only these folders and that finally solved the problem.