Sunday Disaster Story: The Over-Smart Blogger

A few days ago, I received some unexpected help from a well-wisher who had nothing to gain. She gave me some valuable advice and provided resources to help make my blog better. Before that, I used to update blog posts without giving any thought to numbers, or tracking the audience. No one had ever guided me in this way, mostly because I never bothered to ask for help.

It would have been fine if I had just followed her advice and refrained from trying to act over-smart myself! Unfortunately, I am not that person. So, as it happened, I decided to make my blog a bit more professional by switching the hosting platform. Previously, I had been held back because it seemed like a lot of money and it was my first time writing a blog. Now, I had 2 years’ worth of experience, and I thought I might as well try to increase my reach. Big mistake.

I’m not an IT person. Whatever I know about software is from 20 years ago I think, and a bigger person would have realized their shortcomings. Me, I thought what could be so difficult about it, and proceeded to implement my plan. Within 2 minutes, I managed to work out how to backup my work and copy it onto the new blog. So far, so good.

I registered with the new host, and somehow got it into my head that everything will run smoothly and I will never even know the difference. Then something happened, and I erased the whole original website, wiped it off the face of the internet! And try as I might, I couldn’t get the new version to work properly. I was in hysterics. It felt like 2 years worth of my work just went down the drain, and nothing was left anymore.

It took 2 days of banging my head against my laptop to finally get some semblance of a blog. My biggest achievement was that I managed to retain the previous data. I had written some 110 plus blog posts, all with pictures and proper categories and tagging. Thankfully, most of it was intact. I did lose all the pictures and am still in the process of attaching new ones to the posts, but by and large, the old blog posts are still intact.

For the last 5-6 days, I have been trying to learn the inner workings of this new blog, and I can’t say that I have been too successful. The images are giving me a lot of trouble, and I keep messing up the software by tinkering with its inner workings. I look up fixes and try to implement them. Sometimes it backfires, while other times I’m just unaware of what I have managed to meddle with.

I’m getting so much data feedback that I don’t understand at all, and I’m forced to think if it was worth all that trouble? Perhaps not. But I did learn a valuable lesson: if you want to go head-to-head with your software, find a comfortable place to sit. Your butt will be very thankful.