Let me start by saying this; net2ftp is the best program in the world. If you happened to visit my site between 12:45 pm and 1:15 pm today you may have noticed my site wasn’t there. Instead there was a nice little error message that my Google Analyticator plugin had performed an illegal operation.
I was at school using WordPress’ built-in file editor to edit my Google Analyticator plugin, when in the midst of adding the 1.1 features all hell broke lose. When I clicked save to test the updates instead of seeing the nice updated message I was granted with an error message. I has forgot to close off a bracket – DOH! Normally this wouldn’t be a problem because I would fix it and upload the updated version within a minute and no one would notice. It wasn’t like that this time.
Since my school blocks FTP, I couldn’t update the file. I tried everything I could possibly do to get that file editor back, but it was no use. WordPress was suffering an error from my own code. I thought to myself this is bad. My site is going to be down until I get back from school, and it’s from my own plugin. Not only will people not be able to download it, they’ll see it took my whole site down! I thought I was screwed.
Then it hit me. There are tons of web proxies out there, maybe there is something for FTP. Boy, am I glad I thought of that. A quick Google search turned up net2ftp, and I enter my FTP information. I was in my FTP server! I quickly uploaded the fixed file and the world returned to normal.
This experience taught me two things. The first thing is that I shouldn’t be making life or death changes to my website from school, when I have no FTP access. Second, I need to do PHP development on something other then my own web server. When something goes wrong it either crashes my site or locks me out. Not good at all. I think I’m going to get my computer setup in a Linux/Windows duel boot so I can use Linux for development. That was if I screw something up my site is safe.
4 Comments
Why dont you just ssh into it and modify the php on the server through vi? i never ftp anything to mysite minus graphics.
I’ve never tried to SSH my server. I’m not even sure if my host allows SSH. Regardless, my school blocks all ports excluding port 80 and 110, so SSH wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere.
Ah….that really sucks. Most hosts will offer ssh if you ask if they dont give it to you up front, usually. Usually they dont allow compilation and other things, but to wget tarballs and extract them and edit them right there makes things so much easier….but since u can’t at school, that really sucked. glad u found a way around it!
today I was at work and I had the same kind of problem you had but I just had forgot to add the rest of the extension to a directory and I was editing this before work and didn’t test it. So when I got here I realized the mistake and net2ftp really saved me since i can’t download any kind of ftp client here