The moral of this little story is – it is not good enough to back up your website on the server, you must also back it up onto disc or external hard drive.
The last couple of weeks have been a little unsettling. Unbeknownst to us, our Troutsfarm Website was slated for deletion by our web hoster through no fault of our own. Just as the flames began to curl up around our last ten years of work, the site was pulled from the fire. Troutsfarm was slightly singed and would never be the same.
Bob sat down to his desk one morning to find an email from Lunarpages saying our site had been deleted. About the same time we realized that our email addresses were not working. The way you find this out is when your friends and coworkers start saying, “I emailed you last week” in an annoyed tone of voice. Now we found that we were unable to open the site or open it in our web editor. It seemed to be indeed, gone.
Bob wrestled with the situation, calling and emailing Lunar Pages, and when we were finally able to see Troutsfarm again, the blog and navigation bars (how you get from one page to all the rest) were gone. He seized the opportunity to download the entire site via ftp to an external hard drive – well over 250 pages not counting the blog posts. The download took about six hours. Then he got us a new web hoster and set up email accounts.
We tried to open the newly downloaded site up in the web editor we’ve been using all these years without success. The file extensions FrontPage needed to “see” the site were gone. We were hoping we could reinsert the navigation bars. Only the top level pages and any embedded hyperlinks are visible although if you know the exact URL for a page as in http://www.troutsfarm.com/Nicaragua/200501/latest.htm you can pull up a page.
So now we’re wrestling with new software that refuses to behave the way we want it to. For example, Bob spent half an hour in WordPress this morning trying to add an extra space between photos without success. I’m unable to change the size of the font in this post, he tells me without going into the main template and jiggering around with the html.
So if you pull up Troutsfarm and can’t find your way around, we apologize. We have a lot of decisions to make regarding the site. We need to decide which web editor to use and if we can afford to spend the hundreds of hours it will take to restore Troutsfarm to its former self.
Our May photos sit patiently in their folders, all photo-shopped and ready to be made into photo album pages but I’m not sure I want to struggle with it. I’m taking the first step by writing a new blog entry and posting it to this new foreign land. I’m even going to be brave enough to add a photo. Hopefully, metamorphosis has begun!
