Web Design

My Bad

Have you ever done something bad?  Not bad in a moral way, but in an, “I can’t believe I just did that” kind of way.  The sort of bad thing that makes you suddenly want to puke.  As you have probably guessed, I did just that.

At work, I’m working on some search engine optimization for our company website.  My first step was to install Google Analytics on what we currently have online and see what kind of traffic we’re seeing.  For those who don’t know, this involves placing a bit of JavaScript code at the end of each page that you want to keep track of.

I started by downloading two copies of each file.  One to work on and one for backup.  The files consisted of .htm and .cgi files.  I’ve never worked with .cgi files, but I could tell the section that outputted the HTML page and I added the script to each page and saved them all.  I uploaded the pages, navigated to the website, and decided that 8:30 am on Monday was just too early to crash the company website.  That was when the puking sensation came.  The .htm pages were fine, but absolutely all of the .cgi files were not showing up.  This was about half of the website and the pages that did the most work, so it was a BIG, “UH OH!”  I calmed down and realized that I had downloaded the backups, so I uploaded them to the site.  No help.

I searched for another 30 minutes trying to find out what had happened.  I found several viable options, but none of them turned out to be my problem.  In desperation, I called the company that built the site and talked to a guy named Brady.  Brady is now on my list of people that I REALLY appreciate.  He found that my text editor (or maybe my ftp client) was saving the files in a DOS format rather than the UNIX format that their server used.  The only difference was an extra character in the coding, but it was enough to shut the whole thing down.  About 30 seconds later everything was fine and I was going for a well-deserved break time.

© 2007 Baba’s Blog.