Thursday, February 19, 2015

Two Of The Dumbest Things I’ve Ever Done

When I make a mistake, I am usually ready to admit it as soon as I figure it out. So I’m going to admit a couple of big ones I’ve made over the past couple of years, first of all because I might keep someone else from doing the same thing, and second because I thought it would make a durn good blog post topic.

Bye-bye domain names

The first thing I did was become indifferent to several blogs I had set up. I wanted neither to continue updating the blogs, nor to continue paying for the domain names. So as GoDaddy would e-mail me and tell me the domain names were up for renewal, I would not renew them…

Without copying any of the dozens of posts I had accumulated throughout my various domains to my desktop.

I even eventually did this with my biggest blog, the natural health one that had over two hundred articles on it. (I did so because I needed to start over with a new domain name that family and friends didn’t know about, because I would occasionally offend one of them with a strong opinion. And I was tired of hearing about their disagreement/hurt feelings.)

Now, that wouldn’t have been so horrible if I hadn’t made the second mistake. As long as I had my web host account, there would have been a way to retrieve the articles from my c-panel. But then…

I cancelled my web host account.

When I get seriously stressed, I get depressed for a while. Nothing major; I don’t eat overeat or quit eating or sleep for twelve hours a day. The main thing that happens is I lose my sense of purpose. I also make stupid decisions.

Just getting ready to make the huge lifestyle change that we did a year ago was stressful, let alone the actual move. Besides, J and I were going to be as “green” and frugal as possible and not have Internet service at home.

Uh-huh. Right.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was that I had not updated the Thesis theme, the theme I’d bought years ago to design my blogs, and so it started having problems interfacing with Wordpress. We didn’t have Internet at home, and at the time weren’t planning on having it. And between adjusting to our new life, and the extreme frustration with trying to do anything using the library’s Wi-Fi, which was slow on its best day, I didn’t want to bother with updating the Thesis theme to see if that solved the problem.

I know, I could have simply reverted to one of Wordpress’ free themes for a while (or forever). But since I’d already let go the domain name of my largest blog I didn’t want to tangle with any of that technical stuff anymore.

So what did I do? I called my web host and cancelled the service. Lost all those articles.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.

Drum roll, please.

I had a year of webhosting pre-paid, and they wouldn’t refund me the money.

AND I STILL CANCELLED!

Here’s the really crazy thing: I could have, since I’d already paid for it, just let my database sit there and wait for me to get happy again.

Because now it’s less than a year since I cancelled, and I’m happy again. If I had just let everything hang out in cyberspace, I could have at least gotten into the database and figured out, along with tech support, how to retrieve all my articles from all my blogs.


Do I regret it? Yes, but not as much as you might think. A couple of the reasons for letting many of the articles go still stand as valid in my mind. However, I would caution anyone who is ever tempted to walk away from their websites: if you know you have good stuff posted there, at least copy it all into a document first. Somewhere down the line, you might find a good use for it.