As you can see, I am finally back online. After a number of back of forth emails and long chats with tech support, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I did what I always do when I want to know something.

You guessed it, I did a Google search for a video tutorial, found an easy to understand one, and followed it step by step. One nice thing about those tutorials is you can pause and rewind as often as you like. It took me awhile, but I’m feeling very proud of myself.

Here is the video if you ever find yourself in my position and want to give it a try. Oh, and I found that my phpMyAdmin was a separate icon on my cpanel, rather than a link at the bottom of the sql database that’s mentioned in the video. Now don’t I sound like a techie!! (Just don’t ask me what any of that means)

Technorati Tags: wordpress, backup and restore, cpanel

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Yay! I managed to fix my other WordPress blog and I got back all of my lost content! As you can tell, I am thrilled, and it was so easy.

I got an answer to the email I sent to my tech support at Netfirms. He told me to go into my themes folder and delete the problem theme. Then the content would revert back to its default appearance. It worked and my blog is as good as new. Take a look for yourself at CanadianWelcome.

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For some reason, I always have to learn every computer lesson the hard way. This time, it involved changing the theme (or appearance) of one of my other blogs. It’s usually an easy process – one click on the theme of your choice and you can see how it looks. If you don’t like it, click on another and change your blog again. I’ve done it lots of times and it’s always easy.

But not this time. I found some new themes and uploaded them to my hosting service. Clicked on the theme I liked and suddenly got the fatal error screen. Not only that, but I couldn’t go back to my administration panel or access any part of my blog. Two years of writing gone in five seconds.

I’m still feeling sorry for myself today, as I wait to hear if my hosting service tech support can fix my mess or not. I did do a backup of the content, but probably about two months ago. So any new posts won’t be there. And since I can barely remember where I live half the time, no way could I re-construct any of the writing.

There’s my sad tale for the day. And what was the lesson I learned from it? No matter how easy a change to my blog might seem to be, I should always do a full backup first. Oh well, it’s not the end of the world, but it bugs me just the same. Please tell me I’m not the only one that seems to make every mistake known to man?

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One reason I love using WordPress for my blog is because of all of the great plugins that are available. Some of them are a little complicated to set up, so I haven’t tried them yet. But the majority so far are fairly simple.

There is a sticky plugin, which I use to keep certain posts always at the top of the page, a spam comment catcher which is amazing, and a podcast plugin which I hope to try soon.

These plugins can be found at various sites on the Internet and are then downloaded to your computer. The next step is usually to unzip the file and read any instructions that are included. Then the plugins need to find their way to your website file manager and into the folder marked wordpress plugins, which is usually in a folder called wp-content. Trust me, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds.

Your plug-ins can either be uploaded from your site or you can use an ftp program on your computer to send them. Once the plugins are in the plugin folder, they will show up on your wordpress Plugins tab where you click for a one time activation.

If you do a google search for wordpress plugin video tutorials and watch one, my instructions will make more sense to you.

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This is a WordPress blog and a little more complicated to insert pictures. I upload the pics to my site and then to insert it, I have to type a path showing where the picture is located. The path has to be exactly right, otherwise instead of seeing my nice photo, you’ll see a small box with an x in the corner. That, my friends, means I made a mistake in the path.

This morning I tried and tried with no luck, went back to see the path I used for other images and tried again. Still no luck. Then I realized I put a / after the www instead of a dot. Once I fixed that, everything was fine.

It’s kind of like calling someone mr instead of mrs, just that one little letter difference can get you in a lot of trouble.

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