How My Husband Killed My Blog

“If I just replace that with this, that will that work, right?” I asked Jeff.

He didn’t respond because his nose was buried in Hayden’s new 3DS playing Mario Kart 7. Apparently, you are never too old for Mario Kart.

“I am going to need your help here,” I stated directly at him, “but I can wait until you are finished with your race.”

I turned my attention back to my computer screen and reviewed what I wanted to change in my head. I have a new RSS and email feed for my blog.

Google has decided to get rid of Feedburner what that means is that if you read my blog in a Reader or get it via email that will stop happening if I didn’t move over to a new site called Feedblitz.

(Now would be a perfect time to say, if you would like get my blog post delivered to you via an email every time I post, click here. It’s free and it would make me very, very happy.  Ok, on with the story.)

The merging of my feeds was fairly easy and I think I did it right. It’s the changing of all the links on my site that has been a little difficult because that requires some messing with the html code of my blog.

I don’t know about you but I make staying out of the back end of things a habit. Whether that back end be on people, animals or blogs, I know there I don’t belong and it is there.

“Ok, what now?” Jeff said giving me his full attention.

I took a deep breath, knowing that I was going where I had no business going.

“I want to put the new link to my feed here. Do I just take this one out and put the new one in?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jeff said as he quickly glanced at my computer, “Just make sure that you close the p tag. You don’t want any widowed tags in there.”

I just looked at him, confused.

“Why would you want to widow the tags?” he said playfully.

When I realized that he was making a joke, I smiled. I then moved the cursor of my mouse, highlighted what I wanted changed and then held my breath.

“There!” I said, breathing again, “I think I did it.”

I clicked over to the much more familiar front end of my blog to check.

“Holy Moly! I worked!!!” I said as I did a little booty happy dance on the couch.

“Whee” Jeff said sarcastically, “can I go back to playing the game now?”

“Well actually,” I began with a sweet smile on my face, “what I really need is this link here changed, the one here in my media box.”

“Oh, I’ll put my media in your box,” Jeff said, snorting at his own innuendo.

I rolled my eyes and ignored him.

“I just don’t see where the code is to change that,” I said.

Like I said, I don’t belong in the back end of my blog but I do like to try and fix things myself.  So I will go back there, look at that html code which I think is written in English but could be in Chinese for all the sense it makes to me, and try to figure out how to do it.

All this gets me is a headache from going cross-eyed.

But at least you can’t say I didn’t try.

Jeff put the game on the table and took my computer from my lap. He looked around, huffed and puffed, looked around some more, cursed, did a Google search, cursed, mumbled, cursed and then said,

“I think if I just replace this with that, we should be able to change that link.”

“You think?” I said, feeling uneasy about the whole thing.

“Yeah, the way your site is coded is not like the examples. I don’t know what they did but as far as I can tell this is the same code and is how it is supposed to be,” he said. “Do you want me to try it?”

I was starting to feel light headed.

He was talking about messing with my blog, something that is very important to me. Something that I have poured thousands of hours into over the course of the years. Something I want to hand over to my children. Something that documents our life as a family.

Sensing my unease, Jeff added, “All that might happen is that it might look off or there will be a blank box there. Then you will just have to contact one of your designer friends in the morning to fix it.”

“Ok… try it,” I said, biting the inside of my lip. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Jeff typed a few things in the space and then hit the save button. He moved the mouse to the ‘view site’ button and clicked

I held my breath.

A blank page appeared before us.

Jeff refreshed.

A blank page appeared before us.

“Huh, well that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Jeff finally said breaking the silence.

He tried to log into my blog’s dashboard.

A blank white page appeared before us.

He tried using a different browser.

A blank white page appeared before us.

“Well, shit.” Jeff said.

I just sat there, perfectly still.

My blog was now a blank white page. Everything was gone.

“It’s just a blog, its’ just a blog, it’s just a blog,” I chanted over and over again in my head. “It’s not the end of the world.”

I took deep breaths and tried to fight the urge to cry and throw a full blow fit that would put a two year old to shame. I willed the tears growing in my eyes to stop.

Even though every fiber of my being wanted to FREAK THE FUCK OUT! I knew it wouldn’t help the situation.

Soon Jeff was in what I can only describe and the bowels of my blogs. He was clicking through things I had never seen before and saying things like FPT and other letter combinations I had no idea what they meant.

“This is just stupid that one little change would kill the whole site,” he said.

I tried to smile and nod but I couldn’t move.  All I could do was wonder if God would care that I was praying for my blog to come back.

Suddenly Jeff said, “There that should fix it.”

And with a push of the refresh button my blog appeared on the screen just as it was before.

I never in my whole life did I want to jump my husband’s bones as much as I did in that moment.

“Wow,” I breathed.

Jeff looked at me, finally, and reading my face asked, “Were you worried?”

“What… me? Worried?” I said as I finally moved my body for the first time in 20 minutes, realizing some new pants would be in order, “Nope.”

There are three lessons to this story; 1) back up your blog and often especially if you are going to play in the bowels, 2) unless you are professional don’t mess with the back and 3) please subscribe to my blog via RSS or email because after all that, I just need you too.