Sometimes change can scare the crap out of you

Earlier this week I decided to make a few changes to the blog. The first change was going to be to move everything to a new folder on my server. I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons, one being that I wanted my root directory free in case I wanted to put something other than a blog on my domain. I found some instructions on the web on how move everything from one folder to another and followed them to the letter.

That’s when everything went terribly wrong.

I won’t go into all the details here, but needless to say I got little sleep Tuesday night. I think I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. trying to fix it. I’m not really savvy when it comes to web stuff, but I’m no dummy either. I tried this and that and the other thing and nothing worked. It was horrible, like how you feel when your computer crashes and you realize you’ve lost just about everything. I was somewhat comforted when I remembered the old blog was still online and active and that I could just create a new blog and import everything from that one. I’d lose the past seven months and approximately 75 posts, but it would at least be something.

I had to step back for a few days. I worried about this a lot because this blog has been like a virtual baby book for Autumn. Did I bother to write down when she took her first steps? No. Can I remember the date she took her first steps? Umm…it was in October…before Halloween. Boy, was I screwed. Also, I tend to keep all my writing. I’m like a word pack rat. I still have my old diary from when I was eleven years old, journal entries I wrote on the back of homework assignments from junior high and a current journal maintained in Word that I’ve moved from computer to computer for well over 10 years. The thought of losing that much writing, writing about Autumn no less, made me want to cry.

But as you can see all is well. I finally sat down at my computer today and fixed it. It turns out all I needed to do was use an ftp program that was more compatible with my Mac. Big duh! My original plan was to move the blog and change the theme, but I think I’ll keep things as they are for now. I don’t want to push my luck.

So now I’m safely ensconced in my new location and will hopefully avoid spammers and my co-workers. Those are the other reasons I wanted to move. The spam is getting horrible. Comment after comment about viagra, casinos and porn have been flooding in. The spam is more of an annoyance than anything and could probably be remedied with a plugin or two. The co-worker thing is a more sensitive issue. I’ve complained about my job here before and there was a time shortly after I returned from my maternity leave that I was extremely unhappy. I had issues with a woman in my unit and brought my concerns to my supervisor, who more or less blew me off. Mind you, that was the first time I had ever complained to her about a co-worker in all the years I worked for her.

After that I couldn’t have cared less about the job. I did my work, but I also spent a lot of time blogging. A lot of time. I had given the link to a lot of my co-workers as a means to keep them posted with baby info while I was on maternity leave and worried that one of the supervisors would one day get the link, find the blog, look at the time stamps of the posts and go “Hmm…”

Anyway, I’m here now and anyone visiting the old link will see a brief message with no redirect. If anyone at work asks, the blog is no more. I’m sure Google will pick up the new link eventually if anyone cares to search for it, but I don’t think they will. It’ll be nice to be somewhat anonymous again.