I went to do some upgrades to the site. Got some work done on a new and improved WP theme, got it looking pretty OK, then went to restructure the site…
And screwed up a setting.
Boom. Whole WP section — the majority of the content — becomes inaccessible. I don’t mean hidden, I mean inaccessible. Even killed my dashboard access to it and the screwed up setting. And since WP stores everything in a MySQL database, it isn’t like I can just download it through FTP, tweak a couple of settings, and reupload.
Mothergrabber.
Thank gorram Elvis I have the hosting set to make monthly backups, keep offline backups of every post in Word format, and Devil Monkey Games is on a three update a week format. Made a second backup of the now-screwed blog. Restored most of it from the backup, restored the other four posts from the offline backups.
Then I had to dig into the second backup’s MySQL database in raw text form, manually extract the new content from the pages (not posts) I’d added as part of the “full WP” mod I was working on to Word docs, strip out all the WP and MySQL artifacts, rebuild the page formatting using CoBlocks for the triple-column layout I wanted, and manually reinsert all the text and pictures. Which required digging all the media files back out of the offline archives.
Gah.
Then I got to screw around with the theme formatting. The one saving grace there is that I had decided to be semi-lazy and start with a bare-bones theme format someone had made for exactly this reason. So once I reuploaded that all I had to do was remember everything I’d done, including hex code for colors in about fifty places.
Finally finished an hour or so ago. For now.
And this is why people come to me to build and maintain websites for them. For me, this was a major annoyance. For someone who hasn’t been screwing around with this stuff for decades, it would have been a complete black box mystery.
But then, The King said it best: “There’s no job too immense, when you got confidence.” Of course, he also said “Now and then, there’s a fool such as I.” Dude’s been dead almost as long as I’ve been wandering around this stinking mudhole planet, and he still has my gorram number.