We’ve all dreaded it: the day something goes horribly wrong with something that’s of ongoing importance for a course we’re teaching. It happened to me the middle of the semester.
I use a multisite installation of Wordpress to run my courses. I try to be very faithful about keeping up with updates as appropriate. It was just that fidelity that caused a problem.
One evening in late March, one of my students emailed to let me know that she couldn’t access the course site---she kept getting an error that said something about too many redirects. I tried to go to the site myself, and got the same error. So I decided to try the sites for the other courses I was teaching this spring. I got the same result. In fact, I was getting the same error for every single site on my domain. Ugh.
I’d done some automatic updates on my Wordpress installation earlier in the day; I can only conclude that one of those updates broke things. Unfortunately, I had no easy way to figure out exactly what had caused the problem or to fix it, nor did I really have the time at that point in the semester.
So I had to scramble. I quickly set up a temporary Google Site for each of my courses. I then did something I’d been meaning to do at the end of the semester anyway: I changed hosting providers. Over the next few days, I set up a new multisite installation of Wordpress, created a new blog for each course, and moved all the essential content over.
Though the timing was admittedly less than ideal, this minor “catastrophe” actually worked out reasonably well.
- I was pushed to do something I’d intended to do, anyway.
- I had a chance to think anew about setup, design, and organization (I opted to set up the new installation using subdomains instead of subdirectories, and my personal site will have a new look when I’m finished working on it).
- My students learned that yes, faculty sometimes mess things up, too (which they probably already knew). They also got to see one example of how to go to Plan B when something doesn’t work as expected.
- I got a reminder of the importance of backups. (Because I use the MarsEdit blogging client, I was able to re-post a lot of older content---including all the essentials for the courses---without much effort. I also use the WP-DB-Backup plugin, but there wasn’t time during the semester to try restoring from it. I suspect that my change to subdomains is going to complicate the process a bit.)
What about you? Have you had a minor classroom fiasco end up working out fairly well? Let us know about your experience in the comments.
[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by quinnanya]