How to make a complete mess of a blog reboot

This last weekend since it was a long holiday weekend I was thinking it was way long past due I started posting to my blog again. But instead of actually just posting I was fiddling around in the back end software, fixing links, adding categories, updating plugins and themes and playing with fonts. Because of course fussy repetitive software fiddling is just so much easier than actually writing anything. (Especially writing anything over 140 characters these days (guilty expression)).

But then late on Sunday there was this auto-tagging plugin that did something stupid, and then there was a plugin to remove the thousands of tags that the auto-tagging plugin created but didn’t, and then there was a theme upgrade that went awry, and a theme downgrade that went even more awry. And after a couple hours of fiddling I found myself staring at a blog that not only didn’t have any new posts in 18 months, it was also worse, organizationally, than when I started, AND it was completely unreadable.

Hooray!

Fortunately, I’ve been making database backups this whole time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue what to do with a database backup should I need to restore it. And it’s kind of unnerving to stand on the edge of a precipice staring at a database interface that’s asking you, “are you SURE you want to drop all the tables in this database? Are you REALLY sure?  REALLY REALLY SURE??” Because I really really wasn’t sure.

But to make a pointless long story short, I got the blog back, I got my design back, all of the fiddling I did yesterday got wiped out, and I’m back to where I started, with no new posts in 18 months.

Except, now, this one.