I also experienced my lowest low smack dab in the middle of Midsummer Scream. Saturday night in Long Beach while around the dinner table with the likes of The Spooky Vegan, All Hallows Geek, Mr. and Mrs. Halloween and Hallow Woods…I discovered my blog was gone.

Gone. Disappeared. Missing.

But surely not…gulp…dead, right? ⚰️

I don’t even remember why I reached for my phone to check something on my site, but I did and my stomach dropped when I got a “Hello, a new WordPress site is coming soon!” message from my new hosting company.

Inside my head, I instantly became a screaming, sobbing heap on the floor because I had messed with tech stuff and knew my blog being gone was all my fault. I was also traveling for the first time in, well, possibly ever without a laptop…so I had NO feasible way to access anything and get the issue fixed.

I took a deep breath and decided it would be okay for a few days. Surely I could get it sorted out once I got back to Texas.

Turns out it wasn’t an easy fix at all.

 

Here’s what happened:

I was in the process of migrating to a new hosting company, and I completely jumped the gun on processing the transfer of my domain registration too.

When I approved the transfer, I essentially told my old hosting company, “Hey, you see all this Halloween content – all 240+ blog posts I’ve written over the past three years that I don’t have saved anywhere else and didn’t backup prior to asking you to transfer my domain? Yeah…I don’t need it anymore. Kthxbye!”

🤦🤦🤦

So…they scheduled it for deletion. Because that’s what I told them to do.

And by the time I realized what I had done and the phenomenal Shannon Mattern, who was already helping me migrate my hosting, stepped in to help…all that content was essentially on a conveyor belt inching its way to a giant incinerator labeled “Permanent Deletion” at the old hosting company.

(Or at least that’s how I picture it in my head. 🤷‍♀️)

But we didn’t know that just yet. We were still looking around wondering where the heck all the files went.

Shannon was determined, repeatedly telling me they HAD to be there somewhere. Meanwhile, I was quietly accepting the fact that I had deleted three years worth of work without a second thought, and I was going to have to start over completely.

Thankfully, Shannon thought to ask whether there may have been a second set of files that were deleted when I processed my domain transfer.

There was a lot of back and forth on this between her and the hosting company over two days. As more time passed, I didn’t have much faith and took to social media to ask for anyone to forward me copies of blog posts they may have saved in their email. It was clear I was going to spend my weekend trying to rebuild.

(Here I have to say thank you, once again, the reader Elizabeth M. for forwarding me more than 30 blog posts she had saved in her email AND to Mike from All Hallows Geek for working some serious Google Magic and creating a spreadsheet of cached posts he was able to dig up. You are both lifesavers.)

You guys were so kind to me once I confessed everything was likely gone by my own doing. So many commented on how calm I seemed to be and, well, I had to be – I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, and I had two choices: throw a tantrum like a two-year-old that did no one any good or take a deep breath and find a way to start over.

Either way, I had to start over.

 

A Glimmer of Hope

It took nearly all day Friday, but finally, the hosting company came back with the answer: YES, there was a second set of files.

Cut to me and Shannon running down a very long hallway towards that incinerator realizing that’s where the files were and saving them moments before they fell into the flames and were lost forever.

Shannon was the one wearing a superhero cape. I was just her bumbling, wise-cracking sidekick along for the ride. 🤓

Thankfully we were able to get them restored, but we still weren’t 100% sure if all the content would be there.

My best guess was I had content through early July when I changed my design – the rest would have to be rebuilt.

I accepted my fate and started trying to recreate some recent blog posts since we had gotten my new design restored. It was THE most painful thing I’ve ever done since starting Spooky Little Halloween because all I did the entire time I worked was mentally beat myself up. Not very productive…

Once I was so fed up with myself that I couldn’t concentrate, I moved on to super cleaning my entire apartment. The Spooky Little Apartment was freakin’ spotless by Sunday afternoon, guys.

Then around 2 p.m. on Sunday Shannon sent me a magical text.

It was all there.

Every last blog post, page and infuriating typo I’ve ever made in my little corner of the Internet. And she was beginning the restoration process.

Cut to me sobbing in a heap on the floor. All the stress, frustration and, quite frankly, self-hatred I’d experienced over the past week finally found its way out of my body via my tear ducts. Relieved doesn’t even BEGIN to describe what I felt in that moment.

I literally cannot thank Shannon enough and have been doing so every way possible. She is a magical blog witch who rescued me from the clutches of evil and taught me a very valuable lesson:

BACK. 👏 UP. 👏 YOUR. 👏 SITE. 👏

And do so every which way you possibly can. I’ve now got a sparkly new plugin installed, I’m manually saving my posts two different ways AND I’ve invested in Shannon’s WordPress Protection Plan because I never, ever, ever want this to happen again. Ever.

Did I say ever? EVERRR.

 

 

Spooky Little Halloween: Zombie Edition 🧟

Now that everything is back, and I can carry on as normal…I can also find the humor in the situation.

So when my brother left this comment on my Facebook post about the blog being alive, I laughed:

“Just the universe giving you content, now you can blog about how it died and came back from the dead.”

(This from the kid who claims he’s never even visited my blog. )

And he’s not wrong. Technically, my blog died. It was on the verge of permanent death, only to be revived at the last possible second.

I’m not super well-versed in zombie lore, but I know enough to confidently say…I’m pretty sure that makes Spooky Little Halloween a zombie blog now.

And how many Halloween bloggers can legitimately say that? (Hopefully not many because that was stressful!)

 

 

This was all a very long-winded way to say…thank you for your patience last week as you looked for my Halloween content and got a ton of different landing pages or weird versions of the blog. I also appreciate you kind words and support as I worked through everything.

Welcome back to what I can confidently say is the Internet’s ONLY zombie Halloween blog. 🎃🧟

 

Happy haunting,