Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Hacking Chinese back again after server crash

As you might have noticed, Hacking Chinese was down for almost a week and went online again only this morning. The server that hosted the site crashed (hard disk failure) and I had to restore everything from backups, which were fortunately made fairly recently. Some comments might have been lost, but otherwise all content is safe, well and now also online.

The reason it took so long to get the site back online is that I also moved the site to a new web hotel, transferred the domain name and changed the theme of the site (as you can see). Please help me by finding problems or suggesting improvements, the current look and functionality of the site is a bit ad hoc.

Image credit: geograph.ie/profile/12869

I’m terribly sorry the site has been down this long, but I hope that people will find their way back here soon. You already have, so welcome back!

I need your help

If you feel at least a little sorry that Hacking Chinese has been down and that the server has crashed, you can help me in two ways. First, the site isn’t fully configured yet and there are quite a few things that need polishing/changing/tweaking. My goal is not to make it look exactly like the old page, but it is supposed to work much like the old one. If you find anything that needs fixing but which isn’t on the following list, let me know!

  • Polish design (suggestions are welcome!)
  • Add Hacking Chinese logo
  • Restore category descriptions
  • Restore pictures/videos
  • Restore footer navigation
  • Sort out sharing options
  • Restore welcome page
  • Transfer comments
  • Restore basic functions
  • Migrate database and content
  • Transfer domain name

Second, I’m afraid people have been scared away by the downtime. Please help me share Hacking Chinese on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media you favour!

A personal comment

It’s rather annoying that technical problems should come in the way of creativity and learning. Of course, I was fortunate enough to have backups and I haven’t suffered very much. All content is still online and a few comments were, although precious, the only thing that was lost because of the crash.

Still, it took me many, many hours to do this, which is regrettable since I could have written a dozen articles in that time. But no crying over spilt milk, eh? Right now, I’m just happy that the server is back online and that everything crucial seems to be working well. I will start updating the site again presently and a newsletter (for the previous two weeks) will be sent out later today.

敬請期待!






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3 comments

  1. Sofia says:

    Yay, good to have you back! I was frustrated there a while.

  2. Hugh Grigg says:

    Good to see you’re back online. Losing all my data is a big fear for me, I have weekly backups but not totally sure if I trust that. What do you use to back up?

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