I've just gone through an enforced blogging hiatus of two weeks, which was painful to say the least. But I'm back on air, and looking forward to catching up.

Some sort of database corruption occurred on some tables, probably triggered by a PHP script falling over while moderating a minor deluge of SPAM comments. I'm not particularly literate in web technical matters, so I was rather confused as the problem seemed to change each time I looked at it, or tried suggested resolutions. At least I've learned a bit more about MySQL and PHP in the process. The whole experience was made more painful by the support approach of my hosting provider - Yahoo! Small Business. I originally chose them because they have a "one click" install of Wordpress, which meant I had one less technical issue to worry about when I made the switch from Blogger. Over the last fortnight I was a regular caller to their support line trying to resolve the issue(s), and so I got an extended sample of the way they work. Their front line agents that man (and woman) the phones are perfectly competent, diligent and professional people, but with only a specific area of expertise. They often need to put you on hold to talk to a second level expert , who you never get access to. Worse, any issue associated with the database can only be handled by e-mail support with, in general, a 24 hour turnaround time. That guarantees that each time you have to go back to them, it's a different technician who picks up the problem, as well as the time lapse involved. I also suffered from the fact that Yahoo! don't support Wordpress or PHP. They said the issue was being caused by my PHP scripts so I should go to the Wordpress forums for support. The Wordpress forums were helpful, but quite clearly suggested that my issue was a database issue rather than a WP or PHP issue, and that my ISP should easily sort it out. Agghh! My thanks to Ismael Ghalimi, and whooami who contributed to helping me on the way. I suggest you choose your Wordpress hosting provider carefully, after researching their support record.

So I've got a lot of posts to write, but at least I missed out getting dragged in to the iPhone coverage.