If you have read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I tend to get long winded. I will skip the full story and just say… My original blog (the whole thing) was eradicated. I went to show someone something that I had posted, and when I pulled up the page I got the “Page can not be found” error. Not believing it I tried a number of different ways to hit it, but no, the whole site was gone. While I do do backups (I am sure that’s not the proper way to say it)(but…), I have just learned that the while WordPress back ups might be a wonderful thing, but the restore tool isn’t. I contacted my hosting company and again, long story short, they were able to restore it from some deep dark recess of the internetwebs. I then started a little fun battle with databases. I personally have never used databases, but apparently WordPress is all about databases. Who knew?. When I would access the site, I was met with “Database Error. Nothing Found”. Nothing? Well, nothing I did could get the site back up and functional again. So, another call into the hosting company to ask what was up. They looked and found that the restored database was not at all right. They (several people working on it) fought it for close to 20 minutes. “Check it now sir”. I opened a new tab and sure enough, the pages loaded. This was a beautiful thing. I could not imagine trying to start this over again. This has been many hours of my life writing it all up. Trying to remake it? Or even restoring from the WordPress back up and having to relink every image and whatnot. I am grateful for my restore. (Yeah, so what’s the point?) The point is, the restore is similar to Pet Cemetery. Once it comes back from the dead, it’s not quite the same. It looks like the old site, sort of, but it has a few issues. One of which (and something which is driving me batty) is that the restore has inserted a bajillion accented A’s (  ). They are everywhere, and for what I can tell, no good reason. The hosting company explained that while they can get it back, sometimes there will be… side effects. So, I get to go through all my posts, hunting down each blasted Â, one by one. I thought, well, I will just search the text and erase, click next, and erase. But no, that would be too easy. Putting  in the “Find” box returns every “a” on the page. Not good. Also, I have noticed that my colors are all off and there are some things missing. So, bear with me, it’s being worked on.
UPDATE: It turns out that I also have other contamination. It seems that I have “, …, and ’ ‘s as well. The ’ is showing up where apostrophes once were.
UPDATE 2: I finished the first page of posts. What a pain in the butt. I am able to copy the text into TextEdit (Mac), and then do find and replace (it recognizes the Â), but being that I have a lot of photos scattered throughout the posts, I can’t take all the text at once, just the text between the images. So, it’s many trips back and forth. But there are SO many of the blasted things, I am bound to miss a few, so the automation helps.
UPDATE 3: If you ever find yourself in this same situation, instead of fixing it in the visual mode, switch to the all text side of things (where all the markup is shown), copy all of that into TextEdit (or word processor of choice), make changes, then copy / paste back into the blog. Check. Save.
UPDATE 4: 09-09-17 I have gone through about 70 posts. I still have about 30 posts to go. I am also fixing some issues with photos because of the formatting that WordPress stripped out of the software. This has caused a few of the older posts to spaz out.
Update 5: 09-18-17 I think I have all the nasty additions cleared. Like I said above, I am sure that there are a few random stragglers, but it’s far better than it was a few weeks ago.
