BeforeCalifornia.com

Yeah.

edit:

Okay, let me clarify now that I’ve calmed down and wiped the snot and tears away.

There are a number of words for how I’m feeling today (and lately) but the one most relevant in this situation is ‘uninspired’. As you can see, I’ve somewhat broken promises made elsewhere to write the next instalment of the Duo series I’m in the middle of—my other literary endeavours are suffering somewhat at the moment, too. Instead of imposing deadlines on myself and feeling useless when I can’t meet them (and ultimately giving up), I think it’s probably a good idea if I take a little break to work on things (both here and…in a more real-world sense) in my own time.

So…that’s it. I don’t know how long this hiatus will last, but it feels good to impose a bit of a refractory period (for want of a better phrase) to give myself some time to think, reassess and come back afresh. It’s entirely likely that when I do come back I’ll have a slew of posts ready; I’ve sprained my ankle and there’s not much to do in this state except stare at my word processor and bash my head against the keyboard in the hopes that a story will appear on-screen. We’ll see, eh?

Thanks for reading.

Ah, technology—at once a help and a hindrance. When I set up this website initially, I was excited that I would finally get the chance to share my writing with people. As it turns out, getting everything up and running wasn’t without its problems and I found myself wondering why I even bothered; this was clearly the internet gods’ way of telling me it wasn’t meant to be. After some all-nighters and a lot of coffee and hair-pulling, however, I finally managed to publish the site exactly as I wanted it to look. For almost three months, everything ran without a hitch.

Until yesterday.

Somehow, WordPress decided it was going to stop working altogether which meant that both my website and the admin interface were inaccessible to me and everyone else. My friend James (whom I love forever—thanks for your help!) did a little digging and it seems that things only went hinky after I installed the Flattr plugin. Great, I just have to get rid of the plugin and everything will run smoothly once more!

Except that it didn’t. I nixed Flattr and the issues remained, so I decided I was just going to have to suck it up and reinstall WordPress. Unfortunately, when I did so, I didn’t back things up as completely as I thought I had and as a consequence lost everything. Thank God/Allah/Buddha/The Dude I only had six posts, right?!

Anyway, what you see now is the product of many hours of blood, sweat and tears (er, maybe not blood but the sweat and tears part is true) clocked in an effort to rebuild the site from scratch. Anyone who managed to escape my whiny rants on Twitter probably didn’t know anything was up and as a consequence won’t notice any differences between the site you see now and the one that was up two days ago. Good. It means I did my job well.

This was all a pain, but in the end I suppose I can’t really be too upset over it all. It took a lot of work to get things back to the way they were but it was almost therapeutic, in a way, to trawl through lines of code and tweak settings. If nothing else, at least I’ve learnt now how to back up everything properly so next time (if there is a next time—God forbid) I’ll be able to stop the same thing from happening.

I’m off to have a smoke bask in the sun and forget this whole mess ever happened. There’ll be a new post up later today, so you’ll all have something to look forward to other than my whinging.