Digg ThisWell, here is what happened:
On Thursday last, I posted a table within my post that broke the layout. The table bled out over onto the nav menu on the right, overlapping the content there and making it impossible to navigate the site properly.
To fix this, I edited my stylesheet. No problem; I’m an old hand at CSS. Well, here’s where the weather comes in: it was bitterly cold outside, and I, dedicated smoker, went outside to have a butt and came in with cold hands. I went to edit the stylesheet, and with one frozen, errant keystroke I ended up blowing away a small section of the stylesheet that broke the site even further.
OK. So far, so good. Then I decided that it was a good time to upgrade WordPress, and I’d finally bring out CB 2.0, which is the stylesheet you’re looking at now. WordPress has finally made it possible to have the program in one directory and the home blog page in another. Cool beans. I started to upgrade…
…and failed to back up what I already had on the server! Through what I can only explain as a royal comedy of errors, a routine software upgrade combined with the upload of two tested-proven documents (the new index page and stylesheet) became a major horror story to rival “The Shining,” “The Stand” or any other Stephen King epic.
To make a long story short: I ended up scrunching my database, had to blow it away and reinstall — with the friendly help from my host at Digital Space, and then re-install WordPress from scratch.
In my dreams, it was going to go off without a hitch. Reality, however, can sometimes be a rather strange bedfellow. So can logic.
Well, I guess I mean fantasy and illogic, actually: I didn’t back up my work. Period. I’m an old hand with computers, having had one in the home for over 15 years now; I’ve forgotten more arcane code than many users will ever learn, and this was the *first* lesson I ever learned.
Now it’s relearned.
So I have re-installed everything, added a few things, recreated my links and categories (if I’ve missed you, it wasn’t personal; just drop me a line), added my hacks, and started over. Fortunately, not all is lost: with the magic of Google, I have been able to retrieve many of my old posts from their cache, which I will soon repost in a special archive section — that is, if I can create my first — and totally unnecessary — hack for WordPress.
