I've always been so careful about all my websites. Always. Never before I lost any data from any of the ones I've maintained over the years… I even have a static version of the longest running blog I kept until I decided to retire it — and I still intend to unarchive it and recover the most interesting stuff, if any.

But then excitement got in my way.

I've mentioned the Pods plugin in my latest weeknote, and how I've seen the wonderful things it made possible in a website I also mentioned there. So, moved by pure excitement, I've been experimenting with the plugin, as my colleagues from the IT department would say, straight in the production environment.

Kids, don't do this at home.

Long story short, I applied a couple of settings that went wrong and, when I saw what happened… puff! went all my posts down the drain. Of course the first thing I did was to log into my cPanel to recover my database backup…

…which was NOT enabled.

Aw, snap. I was taken victim of Murphy's Law and I feel I owe all my readers (the one dozen of them), a sincere apology, as I've messed things up.

I spent this Sunday's early morning up, recovering whatever I could, setting up proper backup measures and safeguarding my data. My weeknotes, written from either Obsidian or Drafts, were the first ones back up. Other posts I had written in the same means also came back right after them. I had less than 130, but each had to be restored manually, a real nightmare. And a whole lot of them, without backups, had to be retrieved from the cache of sites like The Internet Archive, Google, Bing and others.

Like I said. Real. Nightmare.

There are a couple of posts that I've redrafted so I can recover the images I used. Some others went back online but stripped from images. I got tired. I also changed the permalink structure of the posts in preparation for the changes I still intend to process here as I get better acquainted with Pods. Please forgive me for any trouble.

There's also something terribly wrong with the ActivityPub here. So I beg my 10 subscribers to stop following daniel@danielsantos.org in the fediverse and following it again — I myself needed to do it, but I haven't figured out just yet why is this that new posts are NOT being sent Mastodon way. I guess I'll need help from someone more experienced — so if by any chance you are that person, please help me.

Bear with me. I've learned this lesson. And I want to improve things here the best I can. They will improve.

Aw, snap…