Not Really A Phœnix

A couple days ago, my personal server went through a Positively Glorious catastrophe. I was working on the back-end adding a couple more blogs and a mailing list/wiki combination for a friend. When I went back over to my personal website, I didn’t see my blog, but rather aplaceholder page for Bluehost, my shared hosting provider.

My immediate thought was: “Oh shit, what the hell happened?!”

This is the internet equivalent of pulling into your driveway to find that your house is gone and has been replaced by a big, stupid sign that says “Someone should really build a house here.”

Oh shit, what the hell did they do?!

The worst thing about this is that it’s completely my fault. I’d love to blame BlueHost, or the authors of the MySQL database, or the programmers of WordPress, or El Niño, anything! But I can’t. I screwed up.

Oh shit, what the hell did I do?!

I’m All Phœnix-y And Shit

Obviously, I did something, because you’re reading. I scrambled and recovered¹ and like a phœnix, rising from the ashes…

Well, not quite a phœnix. I mean, really. It’s a bunch of websites, not something as spectacular like a magical bird! Still, they were important to me. A lot of what I do is based on the health of that system, of which my blog is the front-end of sorts. I needed it working.

So I worked hard and started rebuilding, with some nice changes.

WordPressµ

I’ve been thinking a lot about changing things around anyway and haven’t had the time. Part of the reason I haven’t had the time is because I’m maintaining not only Positively Glorious, but our family site and about 11 other sites. All the updating, security checking, etc. was a bit much, so I decided instead to create a single WordPressµ installation at The MettaSite (don’t go there yet, it’s still empty .

For those who don’t know…

WordPress MU (µ is the greek mu. Cute, huh?) is the Multi-user installation of WordPress written by the amazing Donncha O Caoimh. Whether they know it or not, it’s what people actually use when they get a blog like mycoolasssite.wordpress.com. The reason this is good is that everyone wants different stuff, and for anyone to maintain 11 different sites means you need to do 11 times the maintenance to take care of all of that stuff. With WordPressµ, you can have as many blogs as you want, but you only have to take care of the plugins, updates, etc. of one of them- the main one.

So, instead of a home at WordPress.com, I know have a home at JMetta.com, where I can host multiple blogs like this one.² Now, whenever I want to have a new home for something, It’s not a matter of installing (and maintaining!) a new set of software. It’s just a matter of pressing a button.

A New Look… ?

I took a lot of time creating the old blog, mostly because I was constantly futzing around with stuff. This time, I wanted to focus more on the overall layout, but do it quickly. I decided that I wanted something clean, with the focus more on the presentation of words than on anything else. The theme I found was nearly there, and after a few modifications, I got what I wanted.

I originally started looking for drastically different layouts, but just couldn’t find any that I liked. I guess once you find something that works, you tend to stick to it until it doesn’t. This still does. It’s pretty similar to the old blog, just cleaner– much less stuff scattered around (especially on the backend!)– and there’s a much bigger picture of Jessie at the top, which I always wanted.

So I’m back, and if not like a phœnix, then at least like a formerly broken website. There’ll be more to come, but I need to get back to work on my secret project.

No Comment

1. which was possible only because I have both database and file backups of my blog! Thank you Lorelle for pointing out to me the stupidity of ignoring that particular strategy! [↩]
2. which is technically http://john.jmetta.com, but thanks to another great feat by Donncha, you see it as http://mettadore.com or http://positivelyglorious.com. [↩]