jammer(six)

Last night I was messing around with sites and I inadvertently crippled my personal finance site. I’ve created a sandbox of sorts , but it wasn’t working properly. I eventually realize that this was because I hadn’t created an .htaccess file for WordPress to store info about redirects. To make a long story short, I fired up my FTP client and copied the file over — or so I thought.

When I awoke this morning, traffic to FiveCentNickel was low and a quick check of my SiteMeter referral logs revealed that I was barely getting any search traffic. I loaded the front page and all appeared to be fine. I was afraid that I had been hacked (again), but was showing no signs of it aside from a lack of search traffic.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I tried clicking an internal link. When I did that, I just got an error instead of the article that I had clicked on. When I dug deeper, I realized that this happened because I had moved my .htaccess file instead of copying it. Aaaargh!

The good news is that I did this late on a Sunday evening, and discovered the problem early Monday morning. There wasn’t much too lose during those few hours. And… I’ve learned a valuable lesson.