Hi friend! If you have been on the armedwithabook.com lately, or received an email authored by jawesome with a copy of Craig Shreve‘s interview, maybe you thought something was strange. 🙂 You were right. Armed with A Book doesn’t look the same anymore and I want to tell you about it. The last two days have been eventful. Here is a brief summary:
After a usual Tuesday work day, around 4 pm, I decided to log into my website. There were a few blog posts to schedule for the week. Time to get to joy hustle (quoting Denise Harper)!
Except I encountered an error every time I tried to go into my dashboard or edit a post. The site was live but for some reason, I could not get into the backend. Something was not right and what usually took the host a few minutes to look into, they couldn’t give me a straight answer. At around 10 pm my host support told me the only way to resolve the issue was to switch off my theme.
Let me spell out the gravity of this: I have the same theme since Armed with A Book launched in 2019.
I knew I was going to lose a lot of work and my brain kept saying: this is going to be ugly.
Yes, I got access back. But my site looked wrong in this backup theme. It still does and you won’t notice if you are reading this in email.
It’s years of work that is all gone. I have never known WordPress without it. I truly had no clue how much power my theme had and now I no longer have it.
Yes, all the content is still there but it just doesn’t look like how it was anymore though I have made it as much of the old version as I can with the limited capabilities of this theme and in the time and resources I have had.
I feel like my favorite shirt randomly came out of the dryer, shrunk.
I feel like I put it there and I never want to do laundry again because I messed it up.
I also feel like I need to know everything about the dryer so it never hurts another of my clothes again.
I am crying really hard as I write this but I am also laughing because I never thought this could hurt so much. I have this fear of losing my website since I started it and most of the time, it’s been good. There have been some downtimes here and there but it has never broken on me. I have been away from it for weeks sometimes but it’s always been planned. There is a content calendar that is usually full a month in advance.
This felt horrible.
As I saw my hosting company support try out things I could do myself, I truly wondered what I was doing. I was never one to look for problems to solve but I love problem solving and coding and computers don’t scare me (grasshoppers do) so why don’t I use my skills better to help myself? As a highly educated person with a background in computing science, I feel I should know more. I should be able to do basic troubleshooting of my website but I have never taken the time in all these years to look into how it works.
That opened up a graffiti of things to learn about.
I had so many questions. I just needed someone trustworthy to ask. So I asked my friends who led to me jawesome who has since offered great advice and shown confidence in my abilities to analyze issues and come up with next steps.
I am still treating my website like it’s going to accidentally get sucked into the dryer because the dryer likes it but I am good. There are so many things I am going to learn because of ‘The Blip’.
I also realised how important Armed with A Book is to me. Since I woke yesterday, I started to put more value into how it looked over what it is about. So this is my reminder to myself:
Armed with A Book is about my love for books and authors and creativity. Should I stop writing and talking to you guys because my website theme isn’t the same anymore? You would say I shouldn’t.
I would say I shouldn’t.
So, I am getting over that broken soundtrack by writing my heart out to you.
We are here and it is time to keep moving forward.
Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. It means the world to me to write to you. Write back to me. Tell me anything: how was your day? What are you reading? I would love to hear from you! If you have ever had something dear to you fail or disappear or be in jeopardy, you know how I feel. I appreciate that such experiences unite us. I want to hear about it!
Kriti
❤️❤️❤️