Running a website is a lot harder than it looks. The pros and cons of running your own website vs. going through Blogger or Typepad are similar to the choice of whether to rent or buy your own home. The freedom to host anything I want and hack the hell out of the software I’m running is nice, but every once in a while I encounter a problem that I can’t just complain to the landlord about. In this case, the comments table of my MovableType database got corrupted sometime yesterday and the only way I could fix it without losing my data was to ssh into the server, login to mysql, and issue a “REPAIR TABLE” command. I know my way around Linux somewhat, but my DBA skills are about on par with George Bush’s honesty. So it’s days like these when I’m eternally grateful to “the Google”. It’s a sysadmin’s best friend.