Lessons Learned from a Broken Blog

I broke my blog late last week while attempting to enhance the layout template. At the lowest point, my homepage was taking twelve agonizing seconds to load, and the comment box would send you to a blank error page when you clicked the submit button. The worst of it, though, came when I rushed through a support forum walkthrough without reading very carefully, and I ended up purging my comments database without taking the proper precautions. My blog comments dropped from 268 to 0 in a matter of clicks. Thursday was a bad night.

 

Once I realized how badly I had messed things up, I spiraled into a full-on panic. The slow loading time and the comment box errors were minor annoyances, but they were nothing in comparison to the thought of losing all of those comments that I had accumulated over the years from friends, critics, and random well-wishers. Imagine the way you might feel if you had accidentally set your old family photo albums on fire because you left them too close to a gas stove on the kitchen counter. My state of mind was something close to that. After a considerable amount of teeth gnashing, denial, and cathartic swearing, I gathered my thoughts, and I realized that my comments were not completely gone.

Since 2008, when I started blogging on my own dot-com, my WordPress blog settings have been configured so that I receive an e-mail every time somebody leaves me a comment. Thankfully, I’ve had the foresight to save those e-mail notifications, all of which duplicate the full text of every comment I’ve ever received at this domain. I spent the entire weekend manually inputting those comments back onto my page through a long, tedious process of copying text from e-mails, submitting comments to my blog posts while disguised as my own readers, approving those comments through my admin dashboard, and backdating every comment to its proper date and time. Although I was able to salvage all of my readers’ submissions, I did lose all of my own comments since my website never contacts me for admin comment replies. So I improvised as well as I could along the way, inserting the kinds of replies that I remember leaving the first time around. I finally cleaned up my mess by Tuesday night.

 

All weekend long, I couldn’t help but feel a little silly over the entire ordeal. The whole comment restoration project made me feel a bit like a self-absorbed, inauthentic fraud. There I was, dedicating my entire weekend to the restructuring of the Temple of KZ. To be fair, I was putting a lot of effort into restoring those comments because I didn’t want my outspoken readers’ past generosity and time to have been in vain. Then again, I would be lying if I said that my compulsion to repopulate those comments had nothing to do with self-aggrandizement and vanity. I’m not going to lie — comments are the lifeblood of a blogger’s vanity. That should come as no surprise, though. What’s the point of self-expression if nobody ever takes notice? I didn’t get into the writing game just to hear myself talk, you know. Comments on a blog are an expression of reader interest, a validation of what the author has said, and what the author will continue to say when fueled by the confidence afforded to him by reader feedback. This comment repopulation project has served to remind me that I should never take my blog comments for granted again.

Once I restored my WordPress comments database to nearly its original form, I decided it was time to stop being lazy, and to start transferring over all of those pre-2008 comments from my old home at Blogger.com. This weekend was the first time that I ever made the attempt. As I look back on all of those comments from the past, I have to wonder what took me so long.

I rediscovered a lot of forgotten history in those earlier submissions. The first comment I ever received as a blogger came from my good friend, Carlos, on September 30, 2002, in response to a blog entry titled, A Tribute to Her. “Kevin, you are a fucking genius”, Carlos had said. I’d like to think that he said that without a trace of irony. I was gratified that he had thought so highly of my writing, but I didn’t feel much like a genius at the time for having allowed myself to fall for a girl who was already in a committed relationship.

I remember those early days in 2002 and 2003, when Carlos, Conrado, and Francisco would rock the comment box on nearly every post. I’m pretty sure they were my only readers back then. It really meant a lot to me that they kept coming back.

I remember receiving those incendiary challenges from “Charlie the Possum” and “The Spider” back when I posted Possum Attack in February 2003. Those anonymous comments still makes me laugh when I think about them today. Nice, Conrado. Speaking of irreverent replies, I fondly remember the time when my discussion of The Deer Hunter in my Movie Titles post from 2002 elicited the following response from an old friend, mild-mannered Ed:

“hey ASSHOLE… that’s not cool!”

That’s the only time when Ed ever felt compelled to leave a comment. It was a good one.

Looking back to June 2003 in Fast Food Humor, I think that was the first time when a reader called me out for taking artistic license during the retelling of actual events. As you can see, seven years later, not very much has changed.

I remember those days in 2004, back when my girlfriend, Diana, and I were still in the earliest stages of our courtship. She sat down one night and read the entire contents of my blog, and then proceeded to pepper my site with comments on entries that were over a year old. I was touched that anybody would ever bother to do such a thing. It was a wonderful thing to know that somebody like Diana could find something of value in this modest little site of mine. I think that was around the time when I really started to fall for her.

March 2005 was the first time when one of my blog entries ever broke the tenth comment mark. Maybe it had something to do with all of the sex talk. It was around that time in general, I think, when my writing made a noticeable turn for the better.

And how can I forget November 2009, back when my buddy, Casey, supplemented one of my denser posts with a lengthy, insightful diatribe? That comment was an amazing gift to this blog. It hardly feels like something I deserve.

Since 2002 and beyond, right to this very day, I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that my small band of loyal readers has shown me. I’m not entirely sure why I started to write a blog back in 2002, but I know today why I continue to do it. As I look back on my modest collection of reader comments, I feel a great sense of gratitude for anybody, and everybody who ever took notice of my meager little voice amid the shrieking wind. I am a better writer today because of all the things you’ve said, my friends. All of you.

So . . . can anybody teach me how to back up a comments database? Because that would be super.