Of Mice and Men and a Lack of Cheese

Well, that plan didn’t work very well…

You all know that I’ve been building a little shop over at Alchemias for a while now. I’ve got all kinds of things over there (prosthetic horns, artwork, divination tools) in addition to offering the small- and micro-business support services (website hosting, print stuff, social media consulting). I went to go try to finish installing an e-commerce module and… well… things didn’t go well.

First, I discovered that my virtual private server (VPS) was underpowered for what I was trying to do, so I upgraded it.

That worked pretty well for about a day, everything seemed much more stable and quick, but then I began the actual configuration, and that brought everything to its knees. Every site on that VPS crawled to a halt, I got constant flags and alerts about them being out of commission… it was not good.

So, I did the research, did the digging, and I found that (shockingly) the very popular and apparently oft-used plugin is notoriously unstable and a massive resource hog, and also does not like running, I guess.

OKAY, NEW PLAN!!!

In a fit of pique fueled by my inability to even access the stupid panel to disable the stupid plugin, I started thinking if there was even anything on there to save because it’s not like I could get to it anyway.

So, I hit the Big Red Button and obliterated the site, taking it back down to skin and bones and barely a front page to say “Yep, it’s gone, more to come.”

Bros and bras and bruhs, I felt liberated at having deleted all that stuff. It was a few years of periodically getting a little bit done here, and installing this over here, and then time getting eaten away over there, and coming back to try to remember what the hell I was planning on doing in the first place. I often go through and do my due diligence of disabling unused plugins, making sure everything is up to date, keeping the themes updated (and deleting unused ones).

And then it hit me.

THIS WAS A TERRIBLE PLAN, I HAVE FUCKED UP.

Okay, it wasn’t, like, a really bad fuck-up or anything, but it’s not great.

One of the many things I do through Alchemias is tarot stuff, and I have a new set of tarot that I’ve been working on for ages. We finally have the technology and the foundation to make it a reality, so I put together a very advanced version of my Paths of Tarot philosophy and guide…

… directly on the Alchemias site, and nowhere else.

I mean, I got into it hard. I explained the story of the elements, I defined why each card was associated with each astrological symbol, I dove into the purpose and meanings of the reversals, and that stupid fucking plugin drove me to such a state of rage that I forgot it existed and blew it all away.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t the worst thing ever, but I have now trained myself to stop trying to retain things in my brain if I have them written down. This is a brilliant cognitive resource management strategy if two things are satisfied: 1) that you keep a mental index of what you’ve written down and 2) that you know where you wrote it down.

My method failed on both counts – again, blinded by vitriol – and now I have to do all that work over again.

BONUS MORAL OF THE STORY

For your own presence of mind, when you have automatic backups running, you should periodically check in and make sure they’re actually running successfully and not just sending you notifications of activity every week.

I used another plugin to keep backups of the entire site, and it turns out that the API that authenticates that plugin to the drive service I was using stopped working some indeterminate time ago. I still got the emails every week confirming that the backup routine ran, but the message never included that tiny little detail that it successfully failed to backup the site.

So, after I realized just how much work I’d lost (honestly, not that much because I’ve been reading and writing about tarot for literal decades), I thought to just restore from backups and… well… yeah, that’s where it stands now.

I’ve spent the last few days moping about it. I can’t say I’m over it, but I can say that I’m ready to get back to it. There will be a newsletter over there, too – a better one, with excellent content – and I’ll cross-post when it goes live.

In the meantime, hold your loved ones close, index your content, and check on your backups. You never know when tragedy may strike (due to rage-induced shortsightedness).