Something really strange happened here yesterday.  I was halfway through posting about our afternoon of throwing £72,000 cars around Surrey, and Wordpress just stopped working properly.  Somehow I became logged out, and then I couldn’t log back in again.

I put the right password in, but I was told it was wrong.  The next step was to get the password re-set, but when I followed the e-mailed link I was told that the password re-set key was wrong.  So there I was, with only one administrator-type account and that was totally locked out.  I briefly considered using phpMyAdmin inthe control panel to manually tweak the user records in the database, but to be honest I don’t have the confidence to do that and everything was running very slowly too so I took the whole site down to give myself a bit of head-scratching time.

After a bit of searching around I found that this is not an entirely unknown problem and somebody had provided a little bit of code that is terribly handy in a last resort situation called Emergency Password Recovery.  Not the catchiest of names, but it does exactly what it says: you run the code and can then set the admin password to whatever you want.  Of course the code is as dangerous as it is useful, and I made sure to call it something else, and to delete it afterwards.

WHile the site was down I also passed some time downloading Firefox 3.  So far its looking good, and does seem a little bit faster.  Not so sure about the so-called ‘awesome bar’ or the new ‘most visited’ button: they could turn out to be annoying pretty quickly.  The zoom is neat and all the security features look good on paper, though they do all their work in the background so should not be too apparent, but I have not really played with it all much yet.

Just out of interest I had a quick look at the logs today to see how many Firefox 3  visitors I have been getting already and came to the conclusion that I don’t particularly attract the early-adopters out there…  so far Firefox 3 accounts for 3% of the last 100 visitors, Firefox 2 15%.   Most visitors are not only using Internet Explorer but are still on IE6 - 42%

Skuds’ top tip for today - if you are using IE6, have a look at Firefox, or even IE7.  Both are miles better than IE6.