I look like I should know all about computers and programming. Yeah, looks can be deceiving.
I like computers and what they can do. I use them plenty and I know enough to get by. I can figure things out if given the time and I have the inclination to do so (I often don’t).
Why am I mentioning this? Because for all that I should know, I still make colossal errors and recently, I committed a huge one:
I lost my site, not once, but twice. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after the first time, but you’d think wrong!
But how did it happen?
It all started innocently enough. On Thursday (February 23rd), I got a message from WordPress that one of the plug-ins I was using (Manga+Press) had an update available. Up to that point, I’d never had any problems with updating plug-ins, so I updated without thinking twice about it. That was when the Funnies navigation buttons disappeared. The new version of Manga+Press used a new post type to distinguish comics and no longer recognized the old posts. And the new plug-in didn’t even work!
I tried other plug-ins that were developed to publish webcomics on WordPress and they all had issues. I couldn’t get the comics to show where I needed them to. They didn’t like the theme I was using. The Funnies wouldn’t show in my media library.
As I was playing around with them, I did SOMETHING that made my site go blank. I couldn’t figure out what. I thought I had done damage to my WordPress files, so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling on the server. It didn’t occur to me that I should make a back-up first. Don’t do this! WordPress didn’t recognize any of my old files and lost all my posts. I was upset. I spent a good deal of my weekend fretting about this.
Then on Monday (February 27th) I had a rare intelligent thought: Ask Bluehost (my web provider) for a backup restore. They responded with three backups I could use. I chose the oldest so I would also undo the plug-in update. They restored the files, but WordPress only reverted back a few hours (I still don’t get this). The comics issue remained.
I thought I could deal with it. But my files all looked messy. I HAD to fix things (I’m obsessive that way). And I tried. Only I made things worse. On Wednesday (February 29th) I screwed up WordPress again. And this time the backup restore didn’t work. My tech support guy tried to restore the WordPress database, but that didn’t work either. I would need to start the site all over.
I hesitated. Did I really want to do all that work again? Any picture files would be okay. I had them all saved on my computer. But there were a lot of posts that I wrote directly on the site. I had no backups of them. Well the site is back up and the content is returning, so obviously I persevered. Alls I can say (and I said this on Facebook earlier) is, “Thank goodness for Google caches!” Whatever posts I was worried about losing, I found. I saved them all on my hard drive and now I just need to repost them. Some (okay, most) old news posts won’t be coming back though…it ain’t news anymore.
So what have I learned?
- I’m dumb. Really dumb. Spectacularly so, in fact.
- Backup the site regularly. Turns out WordPress has an option for this. I’ll be making use of it from now on.
- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If I’m happy with the way a plug-in works, why update it?
- Write locally, post globally. Instead of writing directly in WordPress, I’ll write in Wordpad on my computer and then copy and paste to WordPress on the server. If anything happens to the WordPress database, I won’t lose all my posts again.
- This site means a lot to me. Not many people read the site (yet), but I was devastated at the thought of losing all the work I’ve put into it.