I was wondering vaguely why supernaut’s site stats where plummeting ever lower, though decided it was a post-hack/infrequent-blogging combination, even though new posts didn’t appear in my feed reader either.

Testing out some new caching plugins, I discovered… absence. Everywhere.

Besides the index page, supernaut seems to have evaporated. The database is still there, and all the content appearing in it, up to date, but somewhere WordPress is failing to pull the data into itself.

Poo.

Without knowing why or where things have gone wrong, and only having my stats to guess it’s something I did post-hack, the simplest thing to do it a clean install of WordPress, my templates and plugins, and the database. Taking about 5 hours just to confirm everything is working, and not really being in the mood for that right now, absence will continue for a couple of days.

Poo again.

…

Much thinking on the U-Bahn in the afternoon while going to Kreuzstanbul…

I tried a few things, thinking back also to when I dealt with supernaut being hacked, and thought the problem might lie in the .htaccess file I stitched together, using in part the Perishable Press 4G Blacklist, and other items I knew to cause issues with various bits of PHP.

After a few minutes, I narrowed it down to the excellent few lines that prevent hotlinking of images. The problem? The call to WordPress begins with ‘RewriteEngine On’, as it should. But the hotlinking code also requires it and I’d put it before. Shifting the WordPress code to the top of the document fixed the problem.

I feel a bit idiotic, as it’s been some months since I first added that code, and for the entire time, every page but the index has thrown up a 404 error… I suppose I should clean out the junk in my database now, just in case I can break something else and notice it in three months.