I did a couple of things right to get through the computer disasters of the past couple of days. The best decision I made was to call the young man who had helped me set up the web site for FaithAction in the first place, Dave. I had started out thinking I could think my way out of the problem, but after talking to him, I realized that I had not adaquately understood the underlying structure of the way WordPress works. I knew the information for your site is store in a MySQL database. Somehow, I imagined that the database lived in the files up there in the control panel when I log into the place I keep my site, my host is the way we geeks talk about it, my garage, is how I've come to think of it.

So when I uninstalled WordPress and saw all those files still there, I thought I hadn't actually ERASED anything. Ha. I had in fact erased everything. All that was left was the shell, the icing without the cake, the glory without any of the guts.

Dave and I did a bunch of exploring around...and of course he had to see all the clumsy things I'd done to try to rectify the situation in my ignorance. What on earth do people do who are hesitant to appear stupid and inept and ignorant in front of others? How do they get their messes cleaned up? Do they just not MAKE messes? Of course, Dave assured me that everything I'd done, he too had done once. Whither thou goest, I too have gone kinda thing. Which of course assuages the embarrassment of being a techie who didn't quite realize that if I uninstall WordPress, about two weeks of work is going to slide right down the tubes into oblivion.

And while it did take me two weeks to GET there, it won't take me two weeks to get BACK there. I spent about five hours last night after our board retreat reconstructing the site. It's still bare bones, but it's at www.faihouse.org. I have a couple of tweaks I'll do to it today before we leave for Hot Springs, but basically, this is the site. I rebuilt all the pages and put all the words on there and I'll get the pictures up next week. And there will be some changes anyway, since at our board retreat, we revised our vision and mission. Not a total tidal wave of change, but some good solid changes.

Now, as regards my laptop, which also crashed Friday. I have found my backup files and while Windows won't just "restore from backup" easily (because it thinks this is a new machine, is all I can gather from it), I can certainly just move the files manually from the backup. I need to check out and see why we aren't all just using Windows' generic backup on a regular basis. And the whole thing is a wakeup call about getting backups into the system as a regular and ongoing thing.

That'll fix the files, the photos, the documents, the videos. After that, there is the patient and steady evaluation of what programs need to be reinstalled here. I've got to get ahold of my virus protection people, since this machine thinks I didn't have any and so wants me to pay for a new deal. And there's iTunes and my podcast subscriptions. Essential. I've got my Office to install as well. After that, it's sort of waiting to see what comes up. My guess is that I've swept out a bunch of stuff that I wasn't using and didn't need.

So besides the most important technology lesson (BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! -- JF says the NASA rule is three backups and that is what he does, methodically and consistently-- and amazingly for the rest of his space looks like haphazard chaos), what am I taking away from this disaster? One is that panic and drama just would not have served anywhere in this process and boy am I glad that my boss didn't fall into even the first particle of that because I might have if he did. The other is that, with all things computer, patience is really the most important virtue. When intelligence fails (as mine did...I KNEW there was a database back there. I should have known I couldn't uninstall the program without eliminating the database. Duh, really!) then patience saves. The other of course is to get help from people that know more than you do, and that carries with it the willingness to turn up flat stupid.

Okay, I'm off to install iTunes.