Back!

I am pleased to say that after an absence of 5 days MPB is back. I know I am not the first or last person to ever suddenly lose their blog through their own stupidity. But that hasn’t made the experience any easier.

My main problem is that I am not very good at reading small print. Plus to be frank, at times lacking the common sense and intelligence I know I was born with. This blog is self hosted and has been for just over a year and before that I had owned the domain for 2 years but not moved. So when I needed to renew the domain and web host I failed to understand my own responsibilities.

Price and recommendations from others influenced my decision to move web host and everything seemed to go smoothly. But I didn’t realise (or hadn’t read) that I needed to move the posts and pages for my site. I assumed it would happen automatically.

Last Saturday night my former web  host expired. At the time I was in a pub in Salisbury having consumed quite a lot of wine. We were staying there in advance of a family lunch party on Sunday and had enjoyed a very pleasant afternoon and evening. Reading an email while Master was at the bar (or perhaps in the toilet), I decided I knew what I was doing and cancelled the host. Back at the hotel later, I discovered my blog was gone.

What happened next

Over the next 24 hours, I discovered the enormity of my mistake. My files had been stored on the server of the web host and they no longer existed. That evening when we arrived home I was able to contact the wonderful @Domsigns who helped me start the process of rebuilding.

Since then, I have spent all waking hours (save working, eating, skyping with Master and last night’s munch) working on the blog. Michael managed to retrieve most of my posts plus so so much rubbish stored on the web. Then I was able to access my backed up Blogger blog from a year ago. I am ashamed to say that I hadn’t backed up MPB at all since then. This gave me back all posts up to around Christmas and one from this year.

Then following further discussions with Michael I have copied and pasted cached google archives of my later posts. I still have more net trawling to do, but feel happy to go live again tonight.

What is still to do?

I hate the style and whiteness of what I have now and will need to change that. But for the moment, a functioning blog is more important. I need to sort out my sidebar and blogroll so that I and others can click on appropriate links. Then I will need to trawl through the entire blog to update the tags, categories and SEO. My pages need reviewing and putting back up. This is a salutary message people. Back up your posts and blog.

Now, back to actual writing.