A little too early for Halloween

True horror story: The past week, I have been working desperately to overcome a disastrous database problem in wordcurrents. Two fields in the database totally disappeared, making linking from page to page impossible. All six hundred-plus posts were there, but there was no way to read anything but parts of the front page. Search engines could not find me, and my readership dropped dramatically. I tried several approaches to resolve the problem, but the ultimate solution was to delete the whole database and install a backup copy of the database I made a couple of weeks ago.

Am I glad I believe in backups! I have altered my back up procedure to have the system back itself up automatically on a regular schedule.

I am almost back to normal: I have just a dozen and a half posts to restore, in order to fill in the gap left between September 27 and October 18. The saving grace here is a program called Clipbook that came with WordPerfect. Clipbook saves a permanent copy of anything you save to the clipboard. So, when I knew that I was going to have to replace those items, I went into the database and saved them all in Clipbook, so I could restore them, even the drafts I have not yet posted, like my unfinished review of the production of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.

My thanks to Fei-Jan, who called my attention to the problem.