So last night I went to update one of my entries, and when I went to my admin page, no items showed up at all. There were no errors, but there was no content, either. So I went to the front page of the site — again, no entries displayed. How odd, I thought. If the site had been unable to connect to the database server, I would have seen an error of some kind, so I knew that wasn’t it. At that point, my mind started racing. I was afraid I’d been compromised in some way — it’s aways possible.

I decided I’d check the contents of the database itself. I logged into my server and did some selects on the table. Yep, all the entries were still there. I then went to an export page I created that dumps all my links to a Web page so that they can be imported into antoher weblog package. Everything showed up there as expected. At that point I was really puzzled.

I then inspected my query that returns items for the front page, and saw that it only returns items from the past two weeks. I checked the dates for the entries in the database, and they were all still good. So I ran the query: select now(); and the date on the server was set to sometime in March of 2024. I sent a support ticket to pair.com, and they fixed the problem on the server not long after. As it turns out, they were pointing at an incorrect NTP server. So if you came by sometime yesterday evening and nothing was showing up, that’s why.