As some of you may have noticed, there have been some funky things going on with my blog of late.  It all began when I decided to sit outside on the deck one afternoon with my laptop to write a blog entry.  Since we have dial-up service at our house (dark ages, I know), I wrote the entry in Word, then later went into the house and cut-and-pasted the entry into my blog software. 

Now, it should be noted, I had done this before – several times before, though not recently.  Mostly I write my blog entries directly into the WordPress software, but I had successfully used the Word technique in January and February of this year.

But the most recent time I used it, for an ill-fated entry titled “Yellow Star,” I managed to cause the death of my blog.  Apparently there are some hidden Word commands that WordPress can’t understand, and the end result of these communication issues for me was that I could no longer log on to my blog.

Dennis of Deerfield Hosting did all that he could to help me, and went way above and beyond the call of duty to help.  When Dennis figured out what had happened to my blog, and told me that it couldn’t easily be fixed, I dialed 1-800-call-Dan and begged my ever-patient, ever-wise big brother for help.

Dan set me up with a new blog (you’ll notice that the address is now abbykingsbury.org/books, not /blog), and gave me specific instructions on how to transfer over entries from my old blog to my new one.  But I’m the youngest in the family, and a bit stubborn and impetuous at times, and I didn’t fully obey Dan’s wise instructions.

Once I saw that it was going to take weeks, if not many months, to transfer my old entries over, and once I figured out that my own family members (husband, father, and sister included) had not yet found the blog’s new location, I sent an email to Dennis to see if he could put a note on my old blog to send readers to my new blog.

Bad Abby.  Bad, bad Abby.  Dan told you to wait to do this until AFTER moving all the entries over!!

Dennis very kindly responded to my request by redirecting all traffic from my old blog over to my new blog address.  Wonderful!  Now people can find me!  But wait – oh, no!  Now I can’t access my old entries!!!  All is lost, lost I tell you, a year’s worth of writing gone – fffttt – into cyber-oblivion!  Oh, woe is me, why didn’t I listen to my brother???

You guessed it: I called Dan again.  Dan is amazing, and I owe him BIG TIME.  He suggested that I google my blog and search for cached entries.  And that I do this fast, since those cached entries won’t last forever.

At first Dan’s advice didn’t seem to work.  My jaw clenched, some bad words came spitting out of the corners of my mouth, and my husband beat a hasty and well-timed retreat to an early bedtime.  Smart man. 

But after 3 hours of fusting around, doing some creative google searches for my blog, I’ve finally been able to copy all of my archived entries (I think) into several Word documents that I’ve titled “desperate,” “desperate 2,” “desperate 3,” and so on.  There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of the entries I’ve copied, since I searched by categories, months, and finally exact dates, and there are many duplications along the way.  Sorting this mess out will be much like untangling a large skein of kite string after the kite has gone crashing down into the ocean and dragged and sputtered across the beach. 

And, of course, I’d be a fool to use those Word files to reinstate my blog entries into WordPress.  My plan is to retype everything directly into the blog software (luckily I’m a fast typist) over the next few months.  Tedious, to be sure.  And, sorry to say, I’ve lost many of your comments along the way, since the links from each entry to the comments no longer function.  My apologies, and my regret: the reader comments are usually the best part of this blog.

At any rate, let my experience be a lesson to you.  Never let Word and WordPress communicate with each other, and always listen to your big brother. 

Man, am I going to be tired tomorrow.