19 years ago next week, I started this idiocy. Today, I nearly completely lost all of it, because no matter how long I’ve been doing this web programming thing, I remain an absolute impatient idiot when I decide things need to change. To wit: I decided it was time to find a new hosting home for all web stuffs, and so I did. Dropped my cash for hosting services, began the process of transferring domains, and before I thought to copy the two sites that I was moving, changed the nameservers.

If you’re not a web person, this means probably not much. So allow me to translate: my sites (including the almost nineteen years of random scribbling here) were still somewhere out on the web, but completely inaccessible to me. Much like moving, only before you pack all your belongings (especially that last gift from your departed beloved grandmother and your cat), you erase the memory of your old address from nearly every source you can think of, including your brain.

Fortunately, I’m not super-attached to stuff in general, as the survival rate of anything on a long enough time scale approaches zero. That being so, I only mildly panicked.

Like all good developers, I rarely if ever back up any of my data.

My previous webhost has completely changed their server dashboard (that was the straw that broke my back and made me make the move), and it took me a good hour to find my files and databases, and then another two to make them all work properly on my new host (entirely my own fault — I had to reteach myself WordPress configuration and basic SQL).

So, in the spirit of hopefully remembering this in twenty or so years when I decide to do this stupid shit again, I’m putting this in writing. And as soon as I hit post, I will pretend it never happened, because I feel pretty fucking dumb right now.

Plausible deniability is my friend.