Thoughts on my blog being vaporized.
I first saw the note on Twitter, about all the blog posts vanishing into the ether. Notwithstanding my views on Twitter, it was, I think, an apropos way to learn my blog had gone the way of the dinosaurs. I saw this just before going to sleep on a Saturday night.:
I shot off an email to my web guy, asking two all-important questions:
- Was I hacked again, or was this some kind of techno glitch?
- And, more importantly, can you fix it?
If you are reading this blog via an email or RSS feed, there is no need to visit my site to see if it was fixed. It was. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t have been much point in linking to an old piece about being hacked.
But the greater issue for me is, what happens if my blog becomes involuntarily extinct? Nobody really knows how they will feel about their own blogstinction until it happens. (Is blogstinction a word? It oughta be.)
Despite over 1,200 posts in this forum over the course of almost six years, I was, surprisingly, somewhat calm about the prospect. Yeah, I had invested a lot of hours into writing, but nothing happened to my family, my health or my business. It was a lot of time, but I did it because I enjoyed it and if it was lost, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.
Well, maybe that isn’t 100% correct. If it was lost due to a hack, I’d be plenty angry. If your house is vandalized you get angry, but if it’s damaged due to a falling tree, you might be merely upset at losses. There would be no sense of anger from violation.
I lost a little sleep Saturday night, but not much. Mostly I was thinking about whether I would try to revive it, and if so how. And I was mulling new posts in my head, the first of which started like this:
No, it isn’t April Fool’s Day. All the posts on my blog really have vanished…
And another one where, perhaps, I reminisced about a few of the ones I enjoyed writing the most (but was unable to link to them or prove they ever existed), and those I never wrote due to a lack of time.
My blog was obviously restored, for a techno glitch that I don’t pretend to understand, but it was a pretty good reminder of something pretty important since if also follows in the wake of the Go Daddy hacking from a few weeks ago: Having a hard copy of your site on a disk that is not linked to the Internet is a damn good idea.
Well that’s a relief. I assumed I had been deemed unworthy and thus blocked from the site.
Well, that was a scare. In my case, I’d probably freak out, and I’d probably wrack my brains for what I did wrong that I got banned or something. I’d be devastated. But well, things happen. Life goes on, I guess.