So as a few of you noticed, I screwed up the database transfer from the old hosting company to the new, and rendered all non-English characters unreadable. I just re-did the transfer of the old data, merged it with the stuff that’s been added since the transfer, and, knock on wood, all the words with Chinese and German and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic (I think) characters, along with ones in a bunch of languages I didn’t recognize, should be working again. I’m sorry if that startled anyone else. It scared the crap out of me, frankly, when I thought for a moment that we’d permanently lost all that good stuff.

This did provide an interesting data point. Of the 90,031 unique words in Wordie when I did the transfer, 1,973, or around 2.2%, contained unicode characters. A few of those are accented English words or words entered with ligatures, but the great majority are in other languages. Hopefully that number will grow, and hopefully someday Wordie can cater fully to other languages, with localized and translated versions.

Tomorrow I’ll fix the comments and profile info that contain international characters, but for tonight I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Let me know if you come across any words or lists that are still munged.

As some of you have noticed, the layouts of the front page and the word pages have been changed. Listing words is fun, but the meat of Wordie is in the comments and the repartee, so I thought the conversations should be raised in prominence. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are, as always, welcome.

A word about what’s been going on with the site. Wordie finally outgrew the basic hosting it launched on, so this week I moved it to a new home, a VPS on Slicehost. I’d like to think that eventually Wordie will need a dedicated server, but this should do for a while, I hope.

While I was at it I ported Errata over to Blogger, as you may have deduced from the new look. I was hesitant to do this, since I didn’t want to disturb the existing posts and comments, but I decided the benefits outweighed the minor headaches. My Wordie time is better spent working on the site itself, rather than futzing with blog software. I moved all the old posts over to Blogger, and sucked out the old comments as well, though I have yet to attach them to the new posts (I’ll do that soon).

Lastly, I spent some time this afternoon optimizing the db, which sped some pages up 10x. May or may not be noticeable to you, dear reader, but at the least it should help the site better handle traffic spikes, like when William Safire did that “On Language” column about Wordie last week*.

Hopefully this puts site infrastructure in good stead for now, which will both let me get back to building features, and allow Errata to focus less on web development, and more on words and language.

*not true

Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts. I just ironed out some config kinks on the new server, the transfer finally went through, and from reports in the field, they seems to have propagated throughout the pipes.

If this outage really has you hot and bothered, this might soothe you.