23ji no ongaku

I didn’t really mean to close unchained when I did. It just sort of happened. I was really planning on doing things differently, on announcing the blog’s demise and then quietly removing it (only to come back triumphant in the spring with a brand new take on things)…

But things never go the way I plan, mostly because I am a colossal idiot.

Let me explain. On February 17, after weeks of uncertainty and over a year of stunted, uncomfortable blogging, I announced that I would be closing unchained. If you missed the post, you didn’t miss much. I basically said “I’m done hiding behind the person I used to be (pengie), I’m done with this blog, you guys are cool but I am out of here, SEE YA.” I wrote it during a week in which I was a mess, plain and simple. After I published the post, I thought to myself “well, I’ll take some time away from it, then archive all the posts in May and start over.”

The very next day, February 18, I said to myself “you know, I should really just archive the posts now, at a new URL, and direct people to it. That way I can start working on the new blog at the same URL.” That? That was a bad idea. Because of course I wasn’t content with moving the content to something on unchained.nu–I wanted to use my other domain. I found a tutorial on switching WordPress installations to new domains, and on my lunch break, started the process. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until it came to the wp-content folder. If you aren’t super familiar with WordPress, you may not know that the wp-content folder contains all of your themes, images, plugins, and other important uploads. Your actual posts (and comments) are stored in a SQL database, but everything else? The wp-content folder.

I’ll just skip the technicalities and excuses and bitching about misleading things on my File Manager and tell you right now that I deleted unchained’s wp-content folder. Three and a half years of uploaded images, two themes that I essentially re-coded (my Clean2Land mod took 18 hours, EIGHTEEN F***ING HOURS), countless plugins and other little things I hadn’t yet used… gone. All gone. Oh, and the database was corrupted, or something, too, probably because I was messing with Fantastico and Fantastico is the DEVIL.*

I sat there for about five minutes with my mouth hanging open. Then I went back to work. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Finally, when I got home that evening, I tweeted:

I eventually managed to restore a very recent backup of my database to a different location, but since everything is still sort of borked broken, I won’t be making it public right now. And no, I really don’t have any way of recovering my wp-content folder: I made a backup of it at one time, but the laptop I was using then has since been given to my father, so I’m sure it’s gone. And… I’m also pretty sure that was back in 2007 so that wouldn’t be ANY HELP AT ALL anyway, unless you really wanted to read my posts about Tsuchiya Anna’s declining career and Gotou Maki’s chest. (Funny, 2007 sounds no different than 2009…)

So, that’s what happened in a nutshell. But I got over it and now I’m here, happily blogging away. Enjoy your much lower opinion of my technical skills!

* — Funny story: I deleted Amy‘s database on the same day I deleted my blog. Because Fantastico is the devil. I am definitely the kind of person you want hosting your blog. Sorry Amy!