And then I broke the website.
To be fair, I didn’t mean to break the website. In fact, according to the professional who I ended up hiring to bring the website, I wasn’t actually the one who broke it, as much as the breaking was an inevitability that I just… helped happen. Their exact words were something along the lines of, “Whoever was working in the back end of this site before me did some crazy stuff. It’s surprising this didn’t break down long before now.” When I read that message, a wave of relief washed over me: it wasn’t my fault.
Except, of course, it kind of was, anyway; the straw that broke this particular camel’s back was my asking WordPress to update to its latest edition, which apparently just pushed the hinky, taped-together behind-the-scenes too far. I’m not entirely blameless, unfortunately; I just had no idea the damage I’d cause, or what laid ahead when I clicked the button. There’s a lesson there to be learned, I’m sure.
While the site was down, just under two weeks, I felt a sense of frustration at not being able to write anything new, but also a sense of relief: I’d written ahead three weeks’ worth of posts, after all, so it wasn’t as if I would feel under the gun if and when the site retuned; I could just reschedule those for the future and my buffer would still exist. Except, of course, when the site came back, it retroactively posted everything I had already scheduled, and left my upcoming calendar worryingly bare.
The moral of this story, then, is multi-fold: (1) Don’t let your then-spouse jury-rig a website because they might make weird decisions that will cause the site to go down years after you’ve divorced. (2) Don’t schedule things out in advance because it might bite you in the ass. (3) Maybe just write when you have the chance, even if you can’t put it on the website anyway, so that time isn’t lost. (4) It’s nice to be back, isn’t it?
Hello again. Sorry the site was gone.