I’ve been using WordPress as a content management system for fifteen years or so. It’s had a penchant for losing drafts all of that time. Journalists complain about it constantly. You tend to retain that information in your lizard brain after losing a few pieces and get in the habit of saving things into other systems when it starts to get janky. Call it muscle memory.
However, as I learned tonight, if you don’t have a longtime blogging habit you don’t have this habit. I spent the last forty five minutes writing about my memories of Hurricane Sandy and how the crisis in Texas is bringing back memories of the storm that brought about my preparedness interest.
Sadly an expired SSL cert meant I couldn’t publish the draft. I asked Alex to help fix it as he’s got a knack for fixing glitches quickly. I warned him that the post was only saved locally and he should copy it to the phone clipboard and paste a backup into Gmail. He apparently has never lost a draft into the hungry maw of WordPress so “saved locally” was good enough.
After deleting and reinstalling the certificate well I bet you can guess what happened. The writing is lost to the ages. Alex didn’t have the muscle memory to save it to other program. But like hell am I losing my streak of writing every day. So here I am writing about the the annoyance of spending time crafting something only to have it disappear into the ether. A new post will be sent into the world.
I’m somewhat comforted knowing that the post didn’t seem very good to me. Which probably means it was excellent. But alas some eldritch horror has spirited it away into the black hole where lost socks and blogposts live.
I also kid you not I got a text warning me a negative energy had wandered into my room and I should open the door. I guess the world knew I was pissed I lost my post. So I’m going to go burn some sage. Because I live in Boulder and honestly I don’t want the bad juju of anger on me before I sleep. the key to happiness is never going to bed angry. Or so I hear.