The saga with the blog mishap continues…
Back in September (click for the post) of this year, I made several radical changes to this wicker-basketmaking-chair caning blog and was fairly happy with the overall look and feel of it. But then just a few days ago, got a wild hair to switch from a two-column layout format to a three-column.
Well, was that ever a mistake! I should have paid someone to redesign the blog for me, but nooooo… The idea was to open up the sidebars, so I could better monetize the site and add in more widgets to doll it up a bit more. And do a few other tweaks, which would streamline things for me, assuring me of clear sailing ahead.
Well, it just so happens that “Miss Smarty-Pants” code master here, knows just enough code to REALLY screw things up! I messed up lots of the code by just going into it and cutting and pasting, moving this snippet and replacing it with this…. Changing fonts here and colors there, moving this thingie around and that one…
And when I actually switched from the 2-columns to the 3-columns, an error warning message came up telling me that I was going to lose ALL my widgets saying, “Are you sure you want to proceed, you will lose all your widgets?”
I thought, “Yes, I do want to proceed.” After all, I had saved all those widgets and could easily replace them IF they really did get lost or wiped out. Simple, right? I do code all the time, how hard could it be?
I spent literally days fixing this whole blog, redoing all the code and replacing every, single, little widget, because I hadn’t saved them correctly after all.
And I have a backlog of chairs I should be caning, and antler baskets to make for the galleries, to say nothing of putting them up for sale on my domain website–and the Christmas presents! Yikes!
However, in my mania over the last few days as I was stumbled around on the Net doing my research, I discovered some really neat, helpful blog designers with cool buttons, banners and backgrounds! Some sites offer them as free downloads and others charge a nominal fee.
That’s the silver lining to this story and will be fodder for the next few MONDAY MENTIONs here, so stay tuned! I hope you’ve had a good laugh and will mark this down for further reference and here’s hoping you’ve learned something at my expense and it never happens to you.
Let me know how you like the “new look,” by leaving some comments. Oh yeah, that’s another place I screwed up and cut out some code I shouldn’t have. Because now I can’t get the “Author Signature and Date Stamp” in there again! Using the little WYSIWYG element buttons doesn’t do a thing!
Has anything like this ever happened to you before? If so, what was your final saving grace? Did you survive and come out smelling like a rose with all your new-found knowledge? Or did you wise up and hire a pro who really knows what she/he is doing?
Now, to get back to my basket weaving and chair caning and Happy Weaving to you! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! THE END
