INDEPENDENCE CRISIS

I feel very uncomfortable sharing something like this, but I guess that's what a got a blog for.

Monday was as low as I've been all year. My right ankle had gotten progressively worse to the point where standing or walking was almost impossible, and sitting not much better. My lower and mid back got into the fray, making it excurciating to sit, and my head started pounding worse and worse.

(I figured out the migraine came from all the dust the week before. Well, Monday afternoon my relatives came to visit, and of course there was a flurry of work to get the house presentable. [More on that another time.] All of this activity meant dust everywhere, which is what was making my head hurt so badly.)

It was a perfect storm, but I was almost done. I had the day's material all up, and I was just getting ready to use Notify List and tell people to come and read it. I made a couple minor changes to my "Previously, on the Institute" box, and republished.

The website was gone. I had the Empire and Five Kingdoms pictures, and half of my Paypal link, and nothing after.

I republished several times, thinking it was just a quick glitch, only to see nothing change.

Calm but quite concerned, I called Dragon, waking her up on her holiday, and asked her to help. (She's the Hyperion Institute unofficial Webmaster, which means she does lots of work but never gets paid.)

Dragon looked at the template and told me it was completely erased somewhere in the middle of the Paypal code.

"Do you have the template backed up?" Dragon asked.

I pulled up my backups. The last time I saved a backup was March 22, the day after we switched over to the current "black" design we have now. I save the template every time there is a major change, and I hadn't changed it since then.

Except, I had. Probably a hundred hours' worth I've worked on it since then, tinkering here and there. However, nothing was ever big enough to flag my brain as a major change, so I never thought to change the site. The result was a site to totally different from what I had now that it might as well be gone.

Just ten minutes prior the Institute worked. I had the page up, in correct form, and Dragon told me that if I right clicked and hit 'page source' that she could recreate it without a lot of difficulty.

This is where the pain and the tiredness came into play in a major way. I was so blitzed that I didn't think through what she was saying. Idly I clicked on one of the links on the working page, and of course, the moment I hit "back" it was gone, with the now defunct template. Salvation was within my grasp, and I ruined it.

I want you to know, friends; I was very calm. (Well, catatonic might be a more apt description, but you get the point.) I didn't panic and scream. I just got off the phone and told Dragon not to worry about it.

She wasn't very happy about it, but I realized I simply could not fail at another thing in life. I had to fix this myself, without help, and if I couldn't, it was just going to stay that way.

Actually, that was my plan, to keep the site fragged until at least Wednesday. However, after an hour or so I started rebuilding the site. Piece by piece I put it back together, to the point where I have it about 75% reconstructed. I still don't have the Evil Kitties of the Realm, and I've already gotten emails from Readers telling me that they are Evil Kitties, even though I'm fairly sure I only had a few. (And let me take this moment to make an official appeal: if you were an Evil Kitty of the Realm, a S.K.I.T.T.L.E., please let me know, and your Kitty Code name, as that was wiped out as well.)