Reseed the wiki and smile
Technology forcing revision; the story of my life. The tiny wiki that I’ve been feeding like a favourite tomato plant has been lost due to a database failure. All of the king’s horses My best efforts to reload from various backup copies have done nothing more than convince me that restoring a database is among the black arts – the theory and the practice rarely concile. A database with “minus 1749 records” is not worth very much.
So here I am with an XML dump, a SQL dump, a text dump, a lot of personal memories and the need to “start again”. The wiki as a phoenix. All of the image files are safe, so now is the time to revise those early pages. The basic structure of the wiki won’t be too hard to reproduce, because the various dump files did save the index points. Now I get to do the slog portion, trying to remember the particular punctuation rules required by MediaWiki. After two years, I still recommend this project to anyone else with a will to put things in order.
On American Idol, this is “Give Back Week”. Three nights, some decent concert footage from unlikely stage partners (Heart and Fergie). The biggest surprise was to see one of the better male vocalists voted “off the Island”. Given that the worst of are still around, it’s clear that the next few weeks may hold a few surprises. The hard part is that if you vote the good talent off too early, the series risks finishing with a pair on stage that fail to reflect just how far this program has come in seven seasons.
