Some of you may have noticed that And Other Times ceased to exist yesterday from about 7:30pm central time to about 1 or 2am today. Josh was trying to set up a new test site, and when he deleted a folder he had made from that, the public_html folder for this website disappeared as well.
As soon as we both realized that we may have permanently lost more than a year’s worth of content, we started sending out APBs on Twitter and Facebook. Well, scratch that. The first thing Josh did was put a ticket into the helpdesk of our hosting company, midPhase. We weren’t sure if midPhase would be able to retrieve the lost folder, so we were hoping, nay, we were praying that someone was subscribed to my blog via RSS and that that person would be able to copy/paste my blog’s content into a document and send it to me for reposting.
Last night I got lucky.
Erin, the author of The Fierce Beagle, responded nearly instantly to a direct message I sent her through Twitter. She quickly copy/pasted the past four months of content from my blog and e-mailed it all to me.
Shortly after receiving July’s content from Erin, Red (of The Naked Redhead fame), told me she had all my content from July of LAST YEAR in her RSS feed, and wanted to know what I needed. This morning I woke up to a large .pdf in my inbox that included all the rest of the content I had lost.
And just recently, after a nice breakfast out with my family and some of our friends, I checked Josh’s email and found a reply from midPhase: they were sorry to hear about the missing folder, and they had gone ahead and fixed the problem. My website was up and running.
I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have my website back. Actually, as soon as I realized I would have a copy of my content, a load was lifted off my shoulders. Truthfully, I would love if I could someday, somehow generate income from this website. I know that that’s unlikely to happen, but it is a dream of mine. However, I started writing this blog, and continue to write this blog, for Josh and for Jude and for myself. And, it’s like I told Erin: this is my way of chronicling our life as a family, and I would have been devastated to lose all of it.
So, today I am thankful for friendship. I’m thankful for the kindness of new friends and old friends; thankful for my husband who cares about this website and my writing just as much as I do; and thankful for the techies over at midPhase.
Today, click on the links in this post. Visit the sites of people who are kind and generous and good and helpful. If you can, help me repay these people by reading about their lives and what’s important to then. Take a minute to browse through the hosting services of a company that is prompt and helpful when dealing with their customers’ problems. Today I feel blessed, and I hope to be able to be a blessing others sometime soon.
