I have been so busy I’ve neglected my blog.
I inherited The Writer’s Chatroom. When Audrey was at the end of her rope with work, family with health issues and life in general she mentioned closing the Chatroom Site.
Of course, as a true addict to the regular chats, my hand shot up, like Horshack on Welcome Back, Kotter.
I’ll Do It, I’ll Do It
During the past, several weeks I built a new site and moved some information from the original site over. I added a variety of bells and whistles.
Then a group of people suggested a Forum. Now, I’ve had courses in CSS, HTML and JavaScript but a Forum runs on PHP. A forum also requires commenters to have membership on the site.
Two things came together on Thursday evening leading to the destruction of more than a month of work. I could not build a Forum. The Forum I was building had changed twice and both applications were owning my pale white butt. Then I began to worry about all the people coming into the site and randomly registering and gaining privileges to make changes to my site. I am very security conscious and this wasn’t sitting well with me.
I opened an offsite forum for people to use to solve my issues with registered users and potential site wide hacks. After doing this I went to the user restriction area and made a change. During this change, I broke the site.
I tried to fix it for many hours of mind sweating drama. What began as a 500 Error became a 404 Error on all pages. I couldn’t even look at them. Only the main page showed and I couldn’t post or make changes. I couldn’t add pages. I couldn’t do anything. Of course, by now it was TOO LATE to backup and start over with what caused the demise.
In the meantime, I had assigned the Forum work to one of our Moderators. CB and her committee got the forum up and running while I spent Friday and Saturday rebuilding the website from memory.
Today, I am tending things I let slip away.
I need to write another article for the Cleveland Chronicles. I need to get back to the novel I set on the back burner, again. I need to chill.
Thank you CB and company for the great work you have done on the Forum. I never could have regained my sanity without you.
As you go about your day, don’t touch anything sharp!