…but at least I think I know WHEN it happened…

I still don’t know how I did it, but I think I at least know when I lost that post.

SEE, the thing is…I bought the domain www.denfochaos.com. Right now it’s nothing but a blank page where Blogger redirects my denofchaos.blogspot stuff, right?

But because I never learn like to tinker with stuff which already works, thus repeatedly “fixing” what ain’t broke and then being surprised when I BREAK IT, I’m screwing up around with building a wicked cool website.

And by “wicked cool” I of course mean “lame like a fifth grade project.”

Now, obviously, being an experienced mistake-maker IT person, I’m working in what we in the business call a “development environment” – in this case, I’m building a website that “publishes” to my home network rather than the Internet. It works the same as the website will (eventually) (maybe), but for right now only people physically on my home network can see it. (You aren’t missing anything. Seriously.)

It lets me test how things are working (or, mostly, not working), play with looking at it in different browsers and stuff like that, and get the whole thing the way I really, really want it before I expose my lack of skill to the whole world put it out there for real.

It’s a nervous habit developed over the course of making so many embarrassing and very public mistakes that I’ve been tempted to change my name and flee to Texas at least six times a year since 1987 almost twenty years experience with computer-stuff.

OH MY GAWD. It’s not “almost” twenty years. It’s twenty one years. And that’s not counting the work I did before I broke into compu-tating…three years of secretarial and accounting work…GAH!

…my computer experience is old enough to drink…{has a moment of wondering how that much time went by so fast, and why she stills feels like she’s 18 and just starting into the World of the Working…} {except for the aches and pains and a tendency to say things to the office pups like, “You know, back in the day we didn’t have no stinkin’ Google! That’s right, you had to KNOW STUFF, right from inside your head! And if you didn’t know it? You hadda look it up in a book! One of those paper-things with indexes! That’s right! You kids today, you have No Idea how good you’ve got it!”}

Ahem. Anyway. Eventually, I will migrate it to “production,” which would be the actual DenOfChaos site. And then you can all laugh really, really hard at what a bottom-of-class web developer I am. (It is not my forte. Seriously.)

Clear as mud? Good.

Here’s what I think I must have done: I was twiddling with settings the other night (when, by the way, I really should have been going to bed – one should never code while drowsy), testing how long it would take for things to upload and stuff and mucking around with dividing up pages…in other words, I was touching the actual website.

Not Blogger. DenofChaos.com. I must have done something that caused that post to vanish. I’m still not sure how, though. It would seem to me that if I had done something to kill one post, I would have killed all of them.

But I didn’t. Just the most recent one. Argh. OK, I’m still making myself crazy. This is another thing about people who are “into” computers: We know just enough to think we understand what ‘should’ or ‘should not’ cause certain things to happen.

Then, when something happens that ‘should not’ happen, we can’t sleep at night until we figure out why that happened.

This is where a more experienced web person would be all, “Well, duh, Tama, you flibber-gersted the whicha-what! You can’t do that, you have to whangle-blam it!”

Which is exactly what I do to novice database people (“Well, dude, you can’t just upload the data, you need to parse it first, get your diagrams, split your tables so you have best-possible normalization, bing the flam-flim and zing the hoobitz-wha! Geesh, everybody knows that!”), so, you know…it’s that karma thing again.