I’m in tears right now. A few years ago I deleted this blog. I was 100% sure I was done blogging about cults and dealing with Internet hate.
In truth, I was done with so much: politics, hateful comments, and people stealing my goddamned intellectual property without crediting me or asking.
But after deleting the site, I had some regrets. As a writer I felt a twinge of guilt deleting 512 posts. Let’s say each averages 700 words. That’s 358,400 words GONE. That’s the equivalent to several books, although truth be told, just because it’s the length of a book doesn’t mean it needs to be a book.
So recently I’ve been writing a lot more. (You can find out why I quit blogging and just recently returned to writing here on my Huffington Post blog.) And I started telling people, “Oh yeah, I blogged at My Cult Life for years.” They’d ask for the link. I didn’t have one. I deleted the site and it was redirecting elsewhere.
I started feeling like I might have made a huge mistake. Here was all this history – about me, about my writing, about my research – and it was gone.
The problem is that I’m somewhat tech savvy but the minute I regretted it (almost after it was gone) I didn’t know how to restore it. I didn’t even mean to delete the site. That was an accident. One shouldn’t mess with her files if one isn’t sure what she can delete and can’t without losing all her content.
I had backups but they were in SQL not WXR. I didn’t know how to convert them and Bluehost isn’t what it used to be as far as helping inexperienced people like me. I couldn’t find any information online except to go into phpMyAdmin (which could wreck my whole site if I messed it up), create a new database (which I was clueless about), and upload it. Then what? It took several hours before I figured out how to edit some files and it was actually quite simple from there.
But this trial and error process took two days and a lot of frustration. Even an XML or CSV conversion using plugins weren’t working so well and the pro versions were pricey.
Thank goodness I’m persistent. I saved myself some money and look…the blog is back!
Now you’ll notice that my photos aren’t uploaded and that means there’s a lot of broken images. Images that are broken in 512 posts, so bear with me as I fix them or delete them.
Also, you’ll notice that I no longer blog at www.lisakerr.net. I’ll remove those links with time, as well. I do have another blog called www.storiesintheend.com, which has some new writing, but we’ll see if that’s necessary to keep since I have this one.
Anyway, I hope you’ve been well and I’ve missed you all!
Drop me a line. Say hello.
Cheers,
Lisa