Monday, June 23, 2008

Technical Difficulties - Please Stand By

For those of you who know me well, at some point you've heard me talk about how my relationship with technology is not always healthy.

Well, today has probably been the worst example of this ever. If something goofy or never-happened-to-anyone-before can occur with technology, just put it in my hands. I guarantee within 5 minutes, I'll have cracked the silly code that no Engineer could possibly envision.

Ready for this???

As a matter of course, bloggers get their share of trashy comments and trackbacks, and I'm pretty good about cleaning these out a couple of times a day. Well, that's what I set out to do this morning --- and all it took was 3 harmless keystrokes and boom! Just like that, my last 75 blog posts were deleted. Somehow the deletions got done for the blog posts instead of the trackbacks.

Three and a half months of daily blogging flushed away with 3 keystrokes. I'm not going to repeat or elaborate, but let's just say it's thrown off my day a bit.

I've been trying things off and on in between everything else that's been keeping me busy today, but so far, no luck. The posts have disappeared from the server and now from the blog itself, which you are reading now.

So, apologies if it looks like I've taken a long blogging break, or you've been trying to find my recent posts.

Three keystrokes - that's all it took. Can you believe that? For something that could be so monumentally destructive, you'd think Movable Type might have the standard "Are You Sure?" popup to alert you before making that final fateful entry. How about "Are You Freakin' Crazy?" - wouldn't that be a more suitable warning? Whatever.

In the wake of this mini-calamity, though, I'm not about to walk into heavy traffic or anything drastic to end it all in the true romantic style of a doomed writer. There is likely a silver lining that may save the day yet. I've got no online trace of these posts, but I did manage to retrieve them in my cache and make backups as Word documents.

So, with a little help from my friends, I'm hoping to get these posts restored, at least to this blog site ASAP. Until then, please bear with me, and hopefully we'll get things back to where they were soon.

Onwards....

3 comments:

Jon Arnold said...

Posted by: Randall

I feel for you, sometimes you gotta love technology and sometimes you have to hate it.

I have copies of your posts from my local RSS feed if you need copies.

Jon Arnold said...

Posted by: Jon Arnold

Thanks Randall - I appreciate the support. I've got a couple of recovery plans in the works, and I have HTML and text-based versions of all the posts. One way or another they'll get restored - I just don't know yet if it's going be a slow or fast process!

Jon Arnold said...

Posted by: Kevin Restivo

Hi Jon,

Very sorry to hear about the technical problems. As someone who has lost work in past, I empathize.

I prefer Wordpress as a platform - it may be worth the migration process.

Anyway, hope it's not an issue for you again in future and hope you're well otherwise.

KR