The Bloggiesta was a great idea for an event, and I’m really looking forward to the next one because I know it’ll be a lot less stressful. Thanks, Natasha, for all your hard work! Thanks also to those who hosted mini-challenges as well.
Yes, I managed to stay up all night last night for the Bloggiesta! Unintentionally, of course. If you haven’t heard, here’s the post about how I lost 7 months of my blog. How’s that for an anchor post?! (I couldn’t resist some middle of the night humor.)
These lemons are a bit bitter, so I decided to make lemonade! I’ve found out a few tips for you if you ever lose your blog:
- Go to your google feedreader and go as far back as you can for your own blog (hopefully you subscribe to it yourself). I couldn’t believe it when I got to the end of mine and it was the DAY BEFORE the posts that got cut off. I almost cried to have them all there.
- Then, start copying and pasting in your oldest posts, because if you start with the most recent, you’ll cut off the older ones because your feed can only hold so much memory.
- If you’re like me and have backdated reviews (a bad idea I’ve learned), go to google and enter in your blog name and the book title. You may get lucky if the results show your link. But don’t click on it, just click on the ‘cache’ underneath it. It should come up with your post. Yay — I got VERY lucky. All five of the reviews I wanted were there!
- I decided that since I basically lost all my categories, I was going to put most of those in the tags instead. Then, I’ll set up a redirection for the categories to point to the tags. Tags are much easier to enter when I put in ‘s’ title, ‘r’ author, 5 stars, 2000s, and 0-199pp. I just started reorganizing how I’m going to do that. I’ll put setting and original language in the tags as well. Then, when I get finished re-entering all my posts, I’ll have a really nice tag cloud for my blog. I really like the 3-D tag clouds.
- I then went to my gmail trash and found all the comments for my blog that were still there. It only went back to early May, but it’s something. I’ll logout of my account and re-enter the comments as they were entered by the commenter.
So, all is not lost. A lot of it is, but I’m grateful for what I can recover! Also during the weekend, I did a few other Bloggiesta activities:
- Updated the Book Awards Challenge site sidebars to reflect the most recent winners and put links up to show where the lists were in wikipedia or other sites. (About 1.5 hours)
- Helped a friend find and tweak a new theme. (About 2 hours)
- Had an avocado and a couple of burritos with hot sauce during the weekend, but sadly, no beer or margaritas to go with them. (About .5 hours)
- Time spent finding out the reasons for the omissions and recovering a few posts (At least 12 hours)
Although I was heartbroken over losing part of my blog, I’m kind of looking forward to the changes I’m going to make to my site. And hopefully, my experience will help others not suffer the same catastrophe and/or know a little bit of what to do if it does occur.
Seven months of my blog are gone. [edited to add: I've recovered nearly everything now except comments, but it took over 36 hours] Why? For several reasons. First, I tried to ‘upgrade’ to WordPress 2.8. Didn’t I back up? Yes! I always back up before I upgrade. But…. there is a little thing called a php.ini file that has limits. Size limits and time limits. I back up my blog at least once a month, but because I’ve been blogging for over 2.5 years, the size of my file is fairly large. Therefore, every time I’ve backed up in the last few months, my backup was getting cut off at around mid-November 2008. My host is 
