Yesterday I started tweaking and experimenting with menus on the blog again and along the way, something went weirdly and spectacularly wrong. For a time, the site looked like this:
Some of the pages linked in the header, like Short story names, were not even set to be publicly viewable, but somehow ended up displaying, anyway.
I did a restore via Dreamhost, which was imprecise (you don’t pick a specific restore point, just a vague timeframe), but worked, save for three images I had to manually recover. Once I repaired the damage, I went back to looking at kittens on the internet and pondered what to do going forward.
My site is actually quite old for a blog. I started it 18 (!) years ago, in February 2005. Blogs were kind of a big deal back then. Through many themes and redesigns, the blog has mustered on, but along the way it has accumulated piles of cruft, weird bits of code and parts of it feel like they will collapse if you touch them even ever-so-gently.
Yesterday’s menu fiasco has cooled me on mucking with the design for now, but it has got me thinking about what to do moving forward. I am undecided, but can rule out a few things:
- Going back to coding HTML and CSS by hand, like it’s 1999
- Leaving the site as-is indefinitely
- Giving up, curling into a fetal position, and lapsing into a permanent fugue state about “the good old days”
Hopefully the next update about this blog will read less like an autopsy report.
