If you were around on Saturday you might have noticed that my site was down. I know that this was devastating for all 3 of you that read my blog, but for me it was even more frustrating because I had caused the problem that took my blog down. Yep, that’s right…me. One wrong line of code in my files and BAM everything was gone. Of course, the first thing that I did was the most logical- PANIC. You see I am not the best at backing up things. For Pete’s sake it took my husband losing ALL my digital photos, not once but THREE times for me to move them onto a separate back-up hard drive. (Because surely lighting didn’t strike TWICE did it? Nope, it doesn’t. It comes in threes. Dammit)

This all happened because WordPress let me get all cocky. You see, I know that when you come here you don’t want to wait forever for the page to load up. It’s annoying, and there’s wine to drink. I had read an article on how to make your blog faster. One of the recommendations is to use a plug-in called wp super cache. This clears out all the cache that the blog builds up through posting and admin functions and other small things. The plug-in was supposed to clear the cache and therefore speed up loading time for the site. Only, it wasn’t one of those simple plug-ins that you download and activate, You have to go in to you and change some code, make some stiff writable, so on and so forth. And wouldn’t you know, that I screwed it up. Down it went. No admin area, no files, nothin’.

A word about WordPress. Millions use it because it is so flexible. You can make it as easy to use or hard as you want. The more customization you want the harder it is to code and make things click together. My blog is somewhere in the medium range, which means I go into the root files on a regular basis to change things on my blog and customize my branding. I was doing sssooo good too! Nonetheless, there was no backing out of this mistake. I would have to do a restore or start from scratch. And by start from scratch I mean give up completely.

A big shout-out to Hosting 24 who hosts this blog for me. I did have a back up that I had done on the 4th of January (yea, me!) and the fine technicians would restore it for me. Unfortunately, something was corrupted in that file and it couldn’t be restored. Eventually they restored a server back-up. I was only missing a few days worth of stuff that I quickly restored and all was right in my little blog world again.

However, this still doesn’t solve my problem. Because I use pictures on a regular basis, this can make pages slow to load and contribute to lag. No solution as yet, but stay tuned for some small changes so things don’t get bogged down.

What’s the moral of the story? WordPress is lovely and wonderful, but a fickle little bitch.