Any person who have had anything to do with IT (aka everybody) knows, when IT work is being done (even something as humble as doing some rearranging of a little blog like this one), that the word “should” can cover a multitude of unforeseen disruptions. So, maybe the little round of maintenance issues that Michael was dealing with over the weekend and then again this morning (he refers to them in comment 4 here) have, in reality, not yet been entirely sorted. But Michael and I both believe we have good reason to hope that, now, they have been.
One thing that you may have suffered from is that if you clicked on a link from a posting here to another posting here you may, depending on when you did this, have been told “about: blank”, instead of getting to the linked posting. This was caused by the fact that this blog was being migrated (to somewhere cheaper) but migrated before its name had been migrated. It changed its name from “brianmicklethwaitsnewblog” to “3.8.5.22”, and helpfully changed all the links from here to somewhere else here accordingly. It had then to be persuaded that its name was still brianmicklethwaitsnewblog. Which it now has been. As in: should have been.
Other strange things happened this morning, but they too have stopped, and so, touch wood and hope to die, all should now be well. If all from where you sit seems not to be well, please comment to that effect. (That’s assuming the comments system is itself working. Follow the above link and you’ll learn of three lost comments from last night.)
What I’m basically saying is: Sorry if you’ve been mucked about, but with any luck it should have stopped now.
I think we are good now (touch wood).
And of course I was using particular tools for the first time. It will be much easier next time I do something similar.
This blog isn’t such a little blog. Someone has uploaded an insanely large number of photos to it. This means that tools designed for little blogs have a tendency to not work or perhaps to have messages that pop up and tell you that you need to pay money for the pro version for a blog as big as this. This forces me to go off and learn how to do it properly rather than to use some dinky little plugin, which is probably good.
The comments were lost because the quickest way to fix everything was to go back and restore everything from a backup that had been taken before the comments were posted in the first place. (I probably would have gone to the trouble of saving them had they been comments other than mine). The comments system has always been working.