The Joys and Pains of Technology

Saturday began well enough. I wrote the first draft of the back cover blurb for my April release. Then I completed the extensive marketing form for my current work-in-progress (the publisher starts really, really early on these things). And then I completed some of my college homework.

Feeling rather good about what I had accomplished so early in the morning, I decided to upgrade my iMac to the new operating system. That too went without a hitch.

Then I upgraded a plugin on my website. From there, the day disintegrated. I won’t go into the lengthy details. Suffice to say that I’ve had some buggy website issues for more than a year, and I knew that if I wanted to be rid of them, I needed to wipe clean my entire website folder (many items dating back to the mid-1990’s) and start fresh. Clean out all the junk. (Sort of like I need to do in my pantry and walk-in closet. Yikes!)

Actually, all things considered, starting over wasn’t a complete nightmare. Hours and hours of work were and will still be entailed, but it could have been a complete disaster. I could have lost everything. I could have not had notes of my major design settings. I could have lost thousands of uploaded pictures and graphics and files. I didn’t lose them, although there will be more effort needed to get them back on the site.

There was one major glitch, however. My blog, which dates back all the way to 2002, did not completely make the move via the export/import tool in WordPress. For some reason (perhaps the file was too big), it dropped all posts from July 2014 forward. That’s over two years of missing posts. I have access to copies of those missing posts on my computer, but they aren’t easily moved to my website. Sigh.

The thing is, some of those posts are really good ones. And so, my intent is to repost them on days when I am not posting anything else. I won’t bother with giveaway posts or scavenger hunts or the like. But if I think something bears repeating, it’s going up again.

I do believe this is a “make lemonade from lemons” moment.

~robin