The Write Place

Getting Back On Track…

In late September I told you about my impending move and the fact that you wouldn’t hear from me at the normal time in late October.

Well, the move is over and it went quite smoothly. I am now installed in my tiny new downtown condo that overlooks Old Montreal. In the foreground I can see the trains whooshing in and out of the main train station – Gare Centrale as they call it here. The trains are close enough for watching, but not close enough to be noisy.

However, right in the middle of my smooth move I discovered that something else had gone crash! In between trips from the old place to the new condo I received an e-mail from one of my subscribers advising me that my blog, The Write Place, didn’t seem to be working. Oh, oh.

Sure enough, when I checked into it I discovered that somehow the database that underlies my WordPress blog had been corrupted making it completely inaccessible. Anyone who clicked through to it would see a generic WordPress screen with no content. When I contacted my Web hosting company the news wasn’t good. They advised me that they only keep back-up copies of what’s on their servers for one week and that the only remaining backup of my blog database was also corrupted. So, effectively, I had lost all of my blog posts since March 2005 when I first started The Write Place blog!

Believe it or not, in these high tech days of the World Wide Web, Mars landings, and wireless communications, my Web host company could not somehow salvage an old copy of my database from anywhere!

What that means to my subscribers and those who visit my blog is that the more than three years worth of writing help articles that were posted there are no longer available.

Believe me, I was pretty devastated when I found out the extent of the problem; sick to the stomach would be an accurate description of how I felt initially. Just imagine three years of work simply disappearing and not retrievable!

In any case, once I got over the initial shock I started to look for ways to see the proverbial “glass half full”, rather than completely empty. Here is what I have come up with.

I have taken this disaster turned “opportunity” to recreate The Write Place blog using the latest version of WordPress (2.6). I have also chosen a new template for the blog called SilverLight. In my opinion, this template gives the blog a clean and simple look and feel.

In a couple of weeks I will begin posting writing help articles again. I will be going back to my original draft articles that I did before posting them to the blog originally (fortunately I saved most of those). I will update and revise those and then post new versions to the new blog. This way, month by month I will rebuild the The Write Place blog as one of the premiere sources for practical writing help on the Net.

So, stay tuned for the first article post in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, don’t forget that the Master Source for all of the articles and templates that I create is still at:

http://writinghelp-central.com

That site contains more than 260 pages of free tips, tricks and templates for writing just about anything you can think of when it comes to business and personal writing. (The site currently receives a daily average of more than 10,000 unique visitors from over 175 countries seeking practical writing help).