Hi, my name is Dopey

As part of trying out this new Blog tool, I had to change the default page of the blog. Used to be bw.html was my main page, but this tool (and many others, perhaps) expect the site to be published to a directory, and for index.html to be the main page. So, I changed that in Blogger, republished, and the new tool was happy. Problem was, the “static” site, managed by FrontPage, was still directing to bw.html. This had to be changed in the navigation, which FrontPage merges into every page of the site. The easiest way to make a change like this is to republish the site.

I tried to do this at work one day, not looking too hard at the questions it asked. One question was “Some files on the server have been updated more recently than the local copy. Are you sure you want to update?” I have made various minor tweaks to the files over time, so this was no surprise. I answered “Yes to all” and went on to other stuff while it worked.

Turns out, answering “yes to all” gives FrontPage permission to make all the changes necessary to make the server look exactly like the local copy, including deleting files and directories not under FrontPage’s control. Since FrontPage had no knowledge of anything in the /blog/ directory (and a few other things), it erased the whole thing. The blog itself was completely gone.

My first reaction was, “OK, no problem, I’ll just tell Blogger.com to republish the whole blog.” I did and it did, but Blogger doesn’t keep copies of the images - I upload those directly before publishing each post. Having just days before published my 2996 tribute, which hadn’t yet been direct-linked from the project, I quickly re-uploaded those pictures at least, plus the ones used for general page construction, and set up a quick and dirty redirect from bw.html to index.html.

Just today Moonwick managed to restore a two-month-old backup of the site, which brought back most of the images. I’m going to have to hunt down any image links from more recently and re-upload them. Quite a few came through mobile blogging, so I don’t even know if I still have them.

Anyway, if you find any broken images in my posts since mid-June, please be patient while I try to find the time to relocate and re-upload them.

And remember: friends don’t let friends use FrontPage.