Thursday, April 1, 2010

Farewell, dear Blogs.

It’s not much fun switching on your laptop, following your bookmark to your blog, and seeing that all your posts have vanished. A whole bunch of emotions well up inside you – disbelief, denial, desperation to do something, anything.

You come out of your page, retrieve the bookmark, and click again. Same result. You power down, restart, and repeat, with the same result. Then you follow your links, to the blogs of people you like on the same website, to see if they are OK. And shamefully, you half hope they aren’t, that they are also afflicted by a universal problem, which would be a problem shared. You find they are OK.

Except for one thing – you can’t see any images, like avatars, photos, U-Tube clips, that you know are part of these other blogs. You read a comment about your missing posts, and then another comment about missing images. So there is something wrong with the website! It’s not just you!

Aha! You add your own comments, trying to be happy, hoping that things will be sorted out. And to an extent they are, because later, all the missing images reappear. A temporary glitch!

But your own posts don’t reappear. They stay vanished.

I’m going to skip giving details of my torrid journey through Help facilities. I guess you have experience of these, and maybe you have views that are similar to mine. Somehow, the glorious precision of the English language is lost, and is occasionally replaced by black comedy. “Help! My kitten had crawled over my keyboard and deleted stuff – how can I get it all back?”

Over the next couple of days, it gradually dawned on me that nobody else, kitten-less like me, was screaming about their missing posts. I was alone.

Then, at least I think so, the penny dropped. I remembered using a newly installed internet "café" in the reception area of my apartment block. Just for fun, I’d popped a couple of euro into one of the slots and tried it out. I’d accessed my blog, and hadn’t bothered to sign out, expecting everything on my session to close down when the money ran out.

I’m thinking my session stayed alive after I left, and someone came along and deleted my stuff. Just like the kitten, except I wasn’t around to witness it.

It’s my best guess. And whether I’m right or wrong, I’m a complete nincompoop. :-(

16 comments:

Jon said...

I managed to delete my entire blog once. It is physically located on a server just outside Slough which also hosts our business website. I was mucking around with that - remotely moving files about - when I manade to erase the directory that contained the blog.

Happily, being a business hosting set-up they took backups of everything that was on the disc every 24 hours and kept them for two days, so after some frantic calls I got them all back.

I did feel rather silly though.

Have you tried contacting whoever it is who hosts your blog?

Expat said...

It seems like a huge coincidence that DD's and JW's images should disappear at exactly the same time that your blog went bye-bye. I'm not much of a believer in technical glitch coincidence.

I suspect they've gone forever. I agree with Jon, though. Contact your blog host. At least you might be able to find out what went wrong and possibly protect against it happening again.

Expat said...

CI, did you try the Live Blogger help?

Canary Islander said...

Hello Jon! Hello Expat!

I did consider trying to make contact, but I reckoned I’d be treated as just another one of hundreds of nutcases with kittens, so I was well and truly put off. And I’d hardly be a priority case, because my stuff isn’t important like a business blog.

The clincher for me when I scanned the Help facility was that no other blogger been similary affected. My blog hadn't been corrupted, but my posts had vanished. And I'd been stupid enough to leave my account exposed downstairs by not signing out.

I’m pretty sure it’s my use of our new internet “café” wot dunnit. Lots of the smaller apartments in my block are used purely as holiday homes, and this week has been the build-up to Easter, when there is an influx of people from the North of the island and from mainland Spain who arrive for a one-week holiday. Unlike the UK, Easter in Spain covers the Thursday and Friday (today and tomorrow), so people tend to take the whole working week off, sandwiched between the two weekends at either end.

But since you both suggest I contact the web host, I will now give it a go. At least I'm somewhat calmed down now.

Looking on the bright side, this incident has forced me off my butt to update and test my two back-up laptops. I’m now backed-up to the hilt! Amazing what you can do when you’ve got your back up...

Thanks so much for your concern. I really do appreciate it. I'll report back if I learn more.
:-)

Canary Islander said...

Hi again Expat!

I did look at it, and will try now. My problem (hangs head in shame) is that I'm on dial-up here in the sunshine, not on broadband like in the UK. And when I'm on-line, we are incommunicado via land-line telephone. So in order to maintain domestic bliss and keep my resident in-house natterer happy, I write stuff off-line, and only whizz in and out of the internet after a preliminary and highly delicate negotiation...

Crikey! I'm getting my sense of humour back!!! :-)

Dolores Doolittle said...

Hi CI. Yes! 'contacting the Web host' is Exactly what I would suggest... did I but fully grasp what one was.

Good Luck!

Canary Islander said...

Hi Dolores!
Contacting the web host is difficult. But I think I spied her.
:-)

JW10 said...

Hello C.I

I am a 15 month blogger and the arcane manipulations of the Internet are still something of a mystery to me. A web host sounds like a Queen Spider to me, be careful, man!

Sorry again about the loss of your archive; there's Gremlins everywhere. I still love your sock blogs. Go on, do a BBC: repeat.
:-)

Canary Islander said...

Hi JW!
Happily, you’ll find my "Sock Blogs" if you follow the link called CANARY ARCHIVE at the top right hand side of my front page. I like socker fans, especially you!
:-)

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