Panic Attack!

AHHH! When a customer calls you and informs you that the website that you have been slaving over and already gone live is broken, you panic. I know I just did. I finished with the site over a month ago, and the customer moved on to a search engine optimization company to do whatever little they do for gobs of cash. Having completely forgotten this last bit of information, I made a small change on a page to ensure the web form was reset when users use the back button in their browser. Moving right along like I knew what I was doing (at the time, I really thought I did), I uploaded the changes and ensured they worked as expected.

Little did I realize that this would set in motion a chain of events leading to the phone call I just received. Blood pressure shoots through the roof, heavy breathing sets in, and working under pressure, I feverishly attempt to find my gaffe. I overwrote only four files. I designed the site to be very compartmentalized for easy editing, organization, and reading of code. What was in those files? Which four were they? Oh, shit! One was the index.php file, the mother-lode page from which the rest of the site is carefully choreographed.

Clearly, I had just committed a huge faux-pas, forgetting to make a backup before overwriting a very important file. Well, what changes did the search engine optimization company make? This is where it gets funny. Not much, I think. I don’t really know for sure yet (they have yet to call me), but I notice that they implemented mod-rewrite to get better looking URLs. Of course, this breaks some of the links to images and the stylesheet, which I did not code with an absolute URL. So, I switched the few image and stylesheet links from relative paths to absolute ones, and fixed the links in the header to re-match their new mod-rewritten links. Whew… Hopefully they made no other changes. AHH! My blood pressure is still quite high.