A thousand huzzahs
I’m back! Or rather, my back-catalogue is back for I never truly left you, my dear, dear readers. You may release the breath you have been holding and enjoy the fresh, sweet air of my ramblings here on the Guide. Many thanks to those of you who left me such supportive comments (all sadly though necessarily lost) as “Doh!” and “Spaz!” and “do you know what they do to people like you in Australia?”. Mercifully I am spared one hundred antipodean ignominies thanks to the technowizardry of the utterly marvellous Suburbanmum. You can once again plumb the depths of my blogging history as I am sure you are all wont to do.
By way of explanation, I suppose I should detail precisely how such a catastrophe befell meand briefly how a bloggery death was averted. Sadly I am wholly to blame for the first part and in no way responsible for the second. It is all down to my sloppy filing and inability to tidy up after myself. Essentially, when I originally installed Wordpress on my web site I put it in a little folder called ‘/blog’. Changing my mind, I then moved it to another folder (the root folder, though I have no desire to get too technical here). I left the associated database (the bit with all the posts in) where it was, called ‘/blog’, thinking “I shall remember what that is”, whereupon I promptly forgot. You can see where this is going.
Flash forward eight months or so, and I think that I should have a blog clear-out and revamp (or relocate, I haven’t decided which) when I happen upon a Wordpress database called ‘/blog’. ”Aha,” I think, or in fact, I might even have said it for Jim did question whether I should be deleting that database at all and he can’t yet read my mind so far as I know. ”I shall delete this extraneous hangover of a long-aborted folder” and despite the protestations of the computer - “Are you really sure? You will NEVER get this back” - I insisted upon deletion and the bits and bytes of blogging bent to my will and immolated themselves upon the fire of my stupidity. Two hours later, and the ever-helpful Milo (he of the many blogs) informs me via twitter that my site is down. Upon inspection, it appears he is right and no matter what I try, the Guide is gone. The Guide is finished. The Guide is toast.
Re-installing Wordpress creates a new blog and does not recover my posts and just when I am about to bury my head in my hands and accept that I must copy and paste every post for the past three years into a new blog or simply let it die, I remember that technical support from my hosting company is only a phone call away. The obliging American who answers my queries does so with an entirely appropriate air of incredulity and tells me that, thank the merciful fates, they automatically save two courtesy backups of my site. Perhaps they had been expecting this lunacy from the start. After directing me towards said restorative archives, we end the call and he no doubt records that I am a demonstrable idiot. Who am I to argue? I should be barred from every Curry’s in the land.
Anyway, thank the god of small technological marvels for Twitter. No sooner had I reported my foolishness than Milo strikes upon the solution: Suburbanmum recovers, updates and enhances my Wordpress installation, and here we all are, having a jolly good laugh at my expense, and well deserved it is too. Once again a heartfelt thanks go out to all who helped me reverse my moment of idiocy and re-affirm that, just like my office or my home, my blog should also be subjected to the anal madness currently suffered by my shower.
As I mentioned, rebranding and potential relocating are apace - if I am moving home, I think it right that the blog should too - and I shall keep you apprised of developments as they occur. And should your RSS feed here fail, well, you should probably take that as an update that things aren’t going quite as I planned.
Toodle-pip.
