If you’re a regular reader of any of my websites, you’ve probably already noticed that all of the sites have been down for most of today.
You’ve probably also noticed that, as of the time of writing (8pm, Friday), although most of the sites are now back up, they’re all displaying posts from September, with over a month’s worth of content missing.
This is because, at about 2pm today, our web hosts, Heart Internet, called us to say that while they were working on our server (our sites are huge and take up a lot of space, so we have our own server with them), they had somehow managed to irretrievably lose all of the sites. As in, they were gone forever, with no way of restoring them.
Our server was mirrored – there were two discs, each containing the same information. They had both suffered the same catastrophic event (we still don’t know what that was, exactly), and the data on both of them was lost. Forever.
Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, they told us they had lost this site, The Fashion Police (over 600,000 page impressions per month), Hey, Dollface! (around 90,000 per month) and Shoeperwoman (70,000 page impressions per month), PLUS all of the websites Terry has designed and hosts for our clients. Gone. All gone.
I realise a lot of people don’t take blogging seriously, or understand how someone can make a living from it, but the fact is: we do. Those sites are my livelihood. They are my full-time job. They’re what pays our mortgage, and all of our other bills. They are three years’ worth of 12-hour work days, blood, sweat and tears.
And now I was being told that they were gone for good. My whole livelihood, wiped out in the time it took me to eat lunch. ( And, OK, to watch Neighbours.)
To answer the question I know everyone will ask: YES, WE HAVE BACKUPS. Obviously, given the importance of these sites to us, they are backed up. Even with back-ups though, it would’ve taken us a long time to restore the sites to the way they were. During that time, we would be losing money: we started losing money as soon as the sites went down, and will continue to lose money until they’re fully restored. This is not a few pennies we’re talking about: it’s our livelihood. As it is, we’re going to have to manually restore the last month’s worth of posts to all of the sites, and all of the advance posts I had been writing for my holiday in December are probably gone for good. Which means no holiday in December, clearly.
You can only imagine the day Terry and I have had.
With Heart Internet absolutely insistent that there was nothing they could do to restore the sites, I did the only thing I could think of in my panicked state: I started venting on Twitter. Naturally, Heart Internet didn’t like that much. In one of the many conversations we had with them this afternoon, they asked Terry to tell me to stop tweeting about them, “to allow them to concentrate on fixing the problem.” Obviously this begs the question: what had they been concentrating on BEFORE that? Naively, we’d assumed they were concentrating on restoring the data from our ruined server. The only inference I can really take from “stop tweeting so we can concentrate”, though, is that they were actually concentrating on… Twitter.
I did not stop tweeting. I WILL not stop tweeting, or blogging, or speaking freely about the things that happen to me, because that is my right. I understand that it wasn’t pleasant for Heart Internet to read the hundreds of re-tweets and comments about them. But the fact is, it’s not my job to protect Heart Internet from criticism by keeping quiet about something that was going to have such a huge impact on my business and life. I related what was happening, as it happened, and I got a huge amount of support and advice from the people who follow me (and many who I’d never even heard of until today) – and that was a huge help to me, so thank you to those people.
Obviously, given that the sites are now (mostly) back up and running, albeit with posts missing, it turned out that Heart Internet WERE able to restore the data after all. Why did they call us at 2pm today, then, and say they were all gone forever, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it? I’d love to know.
I will be writing more about this (um, probably much, much more) once the dust has settled and I know exactly what has happened. For now, our priority is to get the sites back to normal, so it looks like we have a long, hard slog ahead of us.
And I never did find out what happened at the end of Neighbours…
[Edited to Add: as the older posts are restored to the site, they initially won't have comments and the images will show as red X's. Don't worry, we are aware of this, it's just going to take a while to fix, unfortunately]
Tagged heart internet, Pro-Blogging, really bad things
So, taking a holiday when you’re self-employed is pretty tricky. And by that I mean, “I think I understand now why I always get ill as soon as I land“.
Not that taking a holiday is easy when you work for someone else, either, of course, but in every “proper” job I’ve had, there’s always been some poor sod who’s been forced to fill in for me while I’ve been gone, meaning that I would only have to come BACK to total and utter stress, as opposed to going AWAY filled with it, on account of I’ve had to do three weeks worth of work in advance, before I go.
Which is basically where I’m at right now.
We leave for Florida on June 18th (also Terry’s birthday, so whew, thank God I won’t have to find something as good as all those surprises for him, eh? Happy birthday, Terry, I am taking you to Florida! You are helping me pay for it! You’re welcome!) . We’re only gone for two weeks, but I’ll need packing time before I leave, unpacking time when I get back and… well, I’d quite like a few extra days to lie around the house feeling sorry for myself, too. Factor in the inevitable flu (possibly of the swine variety!) and I figure I’ll need three weeks. Which means I have to write three weeks worth of blog posts before I go. (Note: not for this blog, obviously. I will be taking the laptop with me, so I’ll be able to update this one “on the go”. It’ll be like you’re all there with me! Either that or it’ll be like I totally didn’t bother to write anything for a fortnight because I’m lazy. Finding out will be part of the fun!) If I don’t do that, I won’t get paid, and then I’ll have to go to the workhouse, wah!
All of which is a long-winded way of saying sorry for the lack of updates, recently, but I’m buried under a pile of BLOG and I can’t seem to get out.
So, how’s your week?
Tagged holidays, Pro-Blogging, work
Yes, I started a new blog. Because I just don’t know where to stop, apparently. Anyway, leaving Shoewawa left a huge, shoe-blog shaped hole in my life, and what better way to fill it than with… er, a shoe blog?
Well, here it is. It’s called Shoeperwoman, and it is, unsurprisingly, a blog about shoes. The site just launched today, so we’re still busy unpacking the shoe boxes and sorting out the few remaining bugs, but I’m going to be updating it as often as I find beautiful/interesting/ugly shoes on my travels around the net. Which is a lot.
Check it out at Shoeperwoman.com. As for me, I guess I should really buy shoes to celebrate, no?
Tagged blogs, midas media, Pro-Blogging, shoeperwoman
So, you know the recession? The big, scary one that’s been keeping us all awake at night as we wonder what the future holds, and just how we’re going to pay for all those dresses we keep buying if it all goes badly wrong? THAT recession?
That would be the perfect time to decide to give up your last remaining freelance writing job and strike out on your own instead, wouldn’t it?
Oh. Good. Just checking.
Today I wrote my last ever post for Shoewawa, which, as some of you know, I’ve been editing for Shiny Media for almost two years now, and writing for it for even longer. (The post itself won’t go up until Tuesday, which is the end of the month, but like the Boy Scouts, I like to Be Prepared, so I wrote it today…) Shiny, as I said above, was my last remaining freelance client. When I first launched The Fashion Police, in 2006, I was still writing for lots of different people. As the site grew, though, and we added Hey-Dollface, I gradually got rid of them one by one (“got rid of” in the sense of stopping writing for them, I mean. There aren’t ex-clients buried under my patio or anything. Well, not many of them…) until Shoewawa was the last one standing.
It’s always been a bit of a balancing act. To start with, obviously, I needed the freelance work to pay the bills, but as my own sites have grown, I’ve been more and more aware that if I want them to continue to grow, I would need to dedicate much more time to them, and that’s time I just haven’t had because it’s all been spent on the freelance stuff. Catch-22.
Now, though, I’ve decided that the time has come to jump off the ledge, basically, and go it alone. It wasn’t an easy decision to make: I mean, I’ve been being paid to write about SHOES, for God’s sake, and if there are jobs out there that are better than that, well, I don’t know what they are. I’ve also met some abssolutely amazing people through Shoewawa (Gemma, Erin, Fi and Emma, to name but four), and,well, it’s going to be a bit of a wrench to leave it after all this time.
BUT.
I’m also really excited. You see, I never, ever wanted to have a “job”. I’m at my happiest when I can be my own boss, answer to no one but myself, and just generally make things up as I go along. Now, after an entire lifetime of working for other people, I’m going to be able to do that, and it honestly feels fantastic. I have lots of things planned: all of the sites in the Midas Media network will be moving to WordPress and getting a bit of a face lift, there’ll be various different features being added, and maybe even a new shoe-based project too, because clearly it would be too much to ask to expect me to stop obsessing about shoes. Oh hell, no.
I will probably be panicking quite a lot, too. It’s only fair to warn you about that.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to mark the end of my time at Shoewawa in the most fitting way I can think of: by buying shoes…
Tagged Pro-Blogging, shoewawa, work
I haven’t left the house since we got back from the Halloween party on Saturday night, other than a quick visit to Terry’s mum (who lives just around the corner) on Monday.
I have no idea how this happened. I mean, I’m going on a beach holiday next month for cryin’ out loud - the plan was to at least go to the gym every day, to prepare myself for the “eating my own body-weight” fest that will be December (holiday AND Christmas – whoops!), but somehow it got to Monday morning, the alarm went off … and I rolled over, looked at it, gave a small, piteous moan, then went back to sleep.
Then I woke up a while later, realised I had seventy gazillion blog posts to write by the end of the day, and ended up still sitting at the computer at 11pm, rubbing my eyes and wishing I had a normal job – you know, one where you don’t have to complete an entire month’s worth of work in advance, just to take a two week break. (Complicated, but that’s how it works, trust me.)
The next day? I did the same thing again. D’oh.
And so it’s gone on, to the point where I opened the blinds in the office this morning, looked out and was actually quite surprised to remember that hey, there is a WORLD out there, people! With, you know, STUFF in it. Yeah. Who knew?
Actually, the Grand Opening of the Blinds this morning was quite the event in itself. You see, up until now we’ve had mostly brilliantly sunny, but bitingly cold weather here. You’d think all this sunshine would make me happy, because I am all about the sunshine, right? Wrong. It does not make me happy. (“Fickle” is my middle name. Always remember that.) Not at this time of year, anyway, because that damn sun is so low in the sky that you walk around permanently blinded by it. And the way our house is positioned, we basically have to have the blinds shut ALL THE DAMN TIME from about October to May, because otherwise we can’t see our computer screens at all. (No, moving the screens doesn’t seem to help. Tried that.)
So, basically, what I’m trying to say here is that I’ve been sitting in a darkened room since Sunday, and actually? I’m starting to feel a little bit hysterical. So when I woke up this morning and realised it was a dull, foggy day, I actually gave a little cheer, because hey, there may be no sun, but at least I can has daylight! For the few short hours that we actually get daylight at this time of year, that is.
Did I mention I’m going on holiday soon? And that it cannot come quick enough?
Aaaand, that’s enough whining from me for one day, I think. How are you?
Tagged holidays, I hate winter, Pro-Blogging, the weather, working from home
Don’t worry, I didn’t fall off my bike a third time and break my pretty little head for good, I’ve just been busy. Busy blogging, mostly – just not here. Sorry.
The last few days have been spent setting up a couple of new blogs at The Fashion Police, both of which are still embarrassingly empty, but hey, doing my best here, mmmkay? First up we have Crimes of Fashion, which exists purely to poke fun at people with bad clothes. Expect to see me on there quite a lot then.
Next up, we have the Celebrity Gossip Blog, which at the moment exists purely to indulge my fascination with Downward Spiral Britney and her trainwreck lifestyle. Brilliant fun.
I’ve also been plugging away, doing my bit over at TV Scoop, a task made ever-harder by the fact that I don’t watch any British TV at all, ever. Don’t tell them that, though.
Finally, The Scotsman called on Sunday morning, looking for an emergency 600 words, deadline Monday morning. I, of course, did what any self-respecting journo would do, jumped on my bike and went for another long ride. I didn’t fall off this time. At least some things are going well…
Tagged midas media, Pro-Blogging
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