So what's the dumbest blog mistake you've ever made? Here's what I managed today. I published a post and put my computer into standby. Later I came back and saw my WordPress editing window open with my post still in it. "Oh, I better save this!" I said, and without thinking, I did. This caused two problems.
1) If you hit Save after you've already hit Publish, usually it simply saves the changes to the published post. That didn't happen this time. The post was pulled from the blog and turned back into a draft. Why?
2) Because it turns out that the editing window was an old one I never closed, and the version I just saved was a very early version of my post, sans pictures, sans categories, sans coherency. I had no backup copy of the published post.
After I stopped hyperventilating, I managed to salvage the correct post by copying and pasting text from the published post already in my feed reader back into the draft and manually reinserting the formatting and photos. Despite my haste I even remembered to check the right categories. But I forgot to change the title of the post and the permalink to match the deleted one, so that's all screwed up now, and I don't want to change them and trigger the third duplicate feed of the day.
One thing I did learn--WordPress saves any comments to the post and migrates it to the new permalink, so I didn't have to worry about that. I suppose it's not as bad as accidentally posting pictures of me in compromising attire, not that any such photos exist (STAY OUT OF MY DESK DRAWERS), but still, I have vowed never to go through that again. No, I'm sure I'll come up with a completely new mistake next time.
This Post was written by Annie from Bon Appegeek
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5 comments:
If you'd like volunteers to join the Homer Simpson "D'oh!" choir I'll join and I'm sure there'll be plenty of others.
When I first started blogging, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to number my recipes. After about 50 recipes I realized the numbers went nothing, so I went back and edited all the post titles, CHANGING ALL THE URLS. Now that was a dumb mistake. Live and learn. Hopefully they are re-indexed by now, LOL.
scott: I do that too, drives me nuts. It doesn't help with my slight OCD either.
trig: That would make the best, most out-of-tune chorus ever.
kalyn: Ha! You know, it was your comment that I worried I lost (it cracked me up), but it came back safe and sound. Phew.
Stupidest thing I've done? Choosing numeric URLs when we migrated to WordPress, rather than text. There were no instructions on the pros and cons, and I had a vague memory that shorter URLs were less of a server hit than longer ones (almost certainly a remnant of the days when I worked for a site that got millions of page-views per day, rather than the dozen we get at MWD).
As a result, our URLs are easy to guess, and we are innundated with spam comments. Luckily, Akismet solves 99% of the problem, but it's caught 16,011 spams as of 7:24 this morning -- less than 3 months after we installed it. Many days we top 1,000 spam comments. Ugh. I hope there's no upper limit on comment numbering in WP, as even the deleted comments eat up a sequential number.
I once deleted my entire template. To this day I do not know how. Fortunately I had saved a fairly recent version. It was terrifying moment when I went to my website and saw a whole lot of nothing.
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