Hello everyone. Welcome to ‘Red Dust Dreams – the book and project. I’ll be telling you all about it as this blog progresses. Along with all the research involved and the writing – and all of it. But before I do anything at all – a warning – and all part of my own mammoth learning experience.
As part of my publishing package with ‘Red Dust Dreams’, my publisher set up this website for me. I would not have been any good at all had I tried to do it – I had no idea where to start nor how to go about it. Even when Linda ‘handed’ over to me, I started having the heeby-jeebies as I was scared to touch even one key, for fear of deleting everything and having to start from scratch. Well – guess what! That’s exactly what has just happened. Not to the entire website, thankfully, but to my blog. I have been becoming increasingly less fearful and more adventurous lately, playing around with the site and was feeling pretty jolly proud of myself. Overall, I hadn’t had to scream for help and had managed to figure most things out.
However, I was trying to publish one post a couple of weeks ago – and it didn’t want to publish. The system would not co-operate with my efforts. Knowing that there have been times when there has been a bit of a wait between my pressing that publish button and actually seeing it live on the site, I decided that this could be one of those times so I left it alone overnight. But when I returned to look next morning, still no sign of it. It was in the post log and saying it had been published – but no sign of it on the site at all.
So I tried again. I deleted it and re-wrote it – and tried to publish it again. Still no luck. Impatience was really settling in and, no matter what I did, I could not figure out what I was doing wrong. I still don’t know exactly. But, getting really agitated, I pressed one button – and lo and behold – I deleted all 27 blog posts! Ouch! Panic hit, forget the agitation.
Searching around, I did eventually find them and immediately backed them all up on my hard drive as well as on a USB and I also printed every post out and have now got a file of all the hard copies. Phew! I googled and searched high and low, through everything I could think of – to no avail. I eventually sent an SOS to Linda and she was a Godsend. Apparently it did take her about an hour to fix up all my mess and get the site back to normal, but – she did it, so I am now continuing – and don’t plan to do anything silly again. Ever.
So, this is my warning and advice. For anyone else who is as green as I was when I started this (and still am, obviously), please DO back up EVERYTHING. As long as all information is backed up safely somewhere, probably no need to do anything more than that. But I didn’t feel happy until I had it backed up in two places (hard drive and the USB) as well as every post being printed out and filed in hard copy.
I have to start all over again but at least I have the copies to work from. I use my blog as proof of my writing for anyone whom asks for it so without it – well, I haven’t got anything. I do realise that the dates for the first 27 or whatever posts will all be over the next couple of days as I repost it all, but that’s a low price to pay for whatever it was that I did to delete the lot.
Anyway, I am starting to rebuild today – so, please enjoy. And thank you.
Looking south east from the northern part of the beautiful Flinders Ranges in SA.
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