I destroyed my web site last night.
Over the last week or so I have been playing around with a color combination I liked. Put it up on the site and surveyed a few friends. Enough of them didn’t like it that I was taking it down. Thought I’d take a new approach.
I uploaded a bunch of new php files to the site and activated them.
The whole site went blank. After many attempts to fix, it just sat there staring at me accusatorily, blank.
The worst part is, I know how to not do this. But I was working late at night and must have forgotten to do something.
OK it happens. You can do something stupid. You don’t panic, you don’t cry. Because you always have backups and you just restore the backups. Right?
Unless it’s your own site. Yes, I do backups. But I had gotten lazy about backing up my database. On this site, without the database, the content of the entire site was pretty much gone.
Fortunately it’s not a deep site. It’s pretty much my portfolio and a bit of a blog. So I just started recreating. Someone was going to be looking at the site in the morning, so I resigned myself to a late night.
Just as a cruel joke, at about 3 in the morning and my espresso machine decided that now was a good time to start sounding like a jet liner, and plunked exactly one sixteenth of an inch of coffee in the bottom of my cup. But even that, I survived.
On my way to bed, it occurred to me — I have backups of all of my clients’ sites. I have backups of their databases. I even periodically go in and do fresh backups of them. I treat them like they are my little chickens. I assume they’re going to make a mistake along the way and I try to watch their backs on it.
So why not for my own site??
I guess I’m no one’s little chicken.
It’s almost a joke among other web developers I talk to, that we never have time to put in on our own web sites. I know some really good developers who have some pretty bad web sites, with unfinished pages and broken links. You hear the words “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” alot.
I know, I know — it’s my marketing tool, my communication channel to potential customers, etc. It’s not even that I don’t know that. Maybe it’s just that the cobbler, when he’s been making shoes all day, when he finally puts his tools away and walks away from his tool bench, the last thing he wants to do is make shoes.
Whatever the reason, I ended up with a new look for the site that I like much better. It’s not completely done, it probably also has some unfinished pages and broken links, because hey, I am still a web developer. I don’t want to completely break tradition.