UGH! 2 Crashes 

In a seriously stupid move, I crashed this site. While updating a post on this site, I was having trouble getting the post to display as wanted. I know blogging with WordPress is not the easiest thing to do – using the free software – but it can work. I use the Astra Theme with the free version of Elementor – both are nice and easy to use. But the blog or post pages are so limited to design changes that I end up compromising many things. Posts have to be edited in the “Block Editor” which is both sparse with options and not very user-friendly – unlike Elementor. I simply wanted to tweak a few things but can not.

I read somewhere about this other theme that is better at blog posts. I thought I would give it a try and see if it did a better job. Unfortunately, when I switched themes, the site crashed. I lost everything. Double stupid, I hadn’t backed up the site before messing with it so it was gone! The last backup was 6 months earlier and prior to a complete design redo. 

At first, I was like no big deal. Revising the overall design wouldn’t be that much work. And I write the text for each page in Scrivener, a writing program I love. Then I copy and paste it to the site. Triple stupid, during the August revision of the site, I’d gotten lazy and started creating text right in the web browser. So the six months of posts were gone too. I’ve spent since Christmas recreating the site. It’s almost put back together though some posts are gone forever. 

Serves me right – I’ve been doing computer work long enough to know how important backups are. Suffice it to say, I have the revised site, even unfinished, backed up and I have all the copy/text copied into Scrivener. 

Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, I had a computer crash at the same time frame. My computer I back up regularly but still, I lost some things. The latest update to the novel Meant To Be and a few short stories were lost as well. The short stories were easy to fix, I’d saved the last revision was close to completion. But the novel was a big loss. I’d cut the original version down from 116,000 words to 92,000. After a search that took four hours, I found a version at 95,000. So Not so bad, but still, it sets me back a few months. 

Needless to say, even though I am writing this on the site – I will copy and paste it into Scrivener.

So my blog post for January is:

BACK IT UP BEFORE MAKING A CHANGE TO ANYTHING!