To be fair, I WAS warned

Aaaaaaand we’re back!

If you’re wondering why this site went four months without a post, it’s not (only) because I’m lazy and a terrible blogger. It’s been broken from the back end and I haven’t had the time or inclination to wade through figuring out how to fix it.

Near as I can figure, this disruption was caused by BlueHost’s upgrading from PHP5.2 to PHP5.4 back in December. Around then, while the site remained readable and visitable, I stopped being able to add posts, edit posts, update WordPress, or anything. And to be perfectly fair to BlueHost, they did warn me that the update was coming and that it might disrupt some parts of my installation:

Should you experience any issues as a result of this transition, please contact a web developer or the developer of the errant software for assistance.

Um . . . okay. I’ve got web developers on speed-dial, dontcha know.

Then today I got it into my head to re-install WordPress en toto, which I’d been kicking around as a possible solution but afraid to try for fear of losing all my existing data. But I convinced myself that losing all my posts was no big deal because at this point the blog was dead anyway . . . So I installed from the BlueHost control panel, and that’s exactly what happened–I lost everything.  Once that happened, I felt an almost-visceral pain from the loss, and I realized those old posts were more valuable to me than I had realized.

That’s when I discovered that the backup plugin I’d been using was worthless.

Luckily, BlueHost had a backup option of its own, and it did work. By now I felt committed to fixing this problem today, though, so I went ahead and figured out which specific files to replace while leaving others alone. And Voila! Here we are. This will never be a blog I update daily or anything like that, but at least now I can update it from time to time.