I consider any day that I don’t post something, as a day off. Since the beginning of 2012, I’ve been doing my Sublime Saturday Assemblage on every other Saturday, instead of every Saturday. My reasoning was so that I could have an extra day off every other week. Normally, I would post Monday through Saturday each week and that began to seem a bit obsessive. So I came up with the new plan, the funny thing is…I’m working even more now.

I usually try to spread things out so that I’m doing something every day, but less on my day off. This last weekend, I worked non-stop. I was trying to do some neat stuff on my blog to make it nicer to look at and easier to navigate, as well as declutter it. I did manage to update my About page, create an Advertise page and removed some other stuff. Plus some other stuff the day after all the craziness happened, it’s just not ready yet.

I’ll admit to anybody that when it comes to most aspects of blogging and all the weirdness that comes with my theme (Thesis) I’m clueless. I try my best and usually find out how to do things one time, then they mysteriously escape my memory (which sucks to begin with).

Here’s where the trouble began, I was trying to make it so that the homepage of my blog would have the 2 sidebars it always has, but just 1 sidebar everywhere else. Sounds easy, but to do it I had to find the right code to put into the custom_functions.php. The custom_functions.php thing is very tricky; if you mess up, bad things can happen. So, to be safe, I copied it before I added the new code to it. Then I pasted the code I was going to put into the custom functions.php thing into Microsoft OneNote along with my notes on what I was doing, just in case something happened.

My notes were all in order and I was ready to go, so I copied the new code from OneNote and pasted it into the custom_functions.php and hit the save button. Everything went blank; there wasn’t an error message or anything. So I hit the back button in my browser to see if that would take care of it. Nope, I got that stupid screen with the HTTP 500 thing where it says it cannot display the page. That freaked me out.

I couldn’t even bring up the page to log-in to WordPress, and my blog had disappeared from the Internet. I don’t remember ever being this freaked out about something before, and I’ve had a kid and had surgery (which they wouldn’t let me change my mind about). I just kept thinking “Well, I guess I just wasted 60+ hours each week for the last 1 1/2 years.” I had never, not one single time, backed up anything on my blog. Everything I wrote, every link and all the comments everybody left were possibly going to disappear forever. It was one of the most awful experiences in my life.

Obviously, since you’re reading this everything has been fixed. My hero—Marissa who blogs over at thirty six months, she knew exactly what I needed to do. She even helped me (even though I had no idea what I was doing) get in there and get things fixed. Seeing my blog back online was the most amazing feeling after all my freaking out.

Why didn’t I ever do a back up? Honestly, around a year ago, I searched around WordPress for instructions on how to do it. There was this ginormous list of gibberish that I just didn’t want to try to decipher, so I didn’t. Apparently there are plug-ins out there that will email you a back up of your site.

Things I learned from this:

♦ Back up any information that you don’t want to be gone forever. Seriously!

♦ Just because your blog completely disappears doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed

♦ Having an amazing support system is essential.

♦ If you really suck at something, it might be best to just pay somebody else to do it the right way.

♦ Blogging is way more important to me than I thought it was.

I’m so happy everything is back to normal again, I was just beside myself. Big thanks to Marissa at thirty six months, a few great Yakezie members and my husband for not making fun of me when I was freaking out (I hadn’t cried in years).