Technical Difficulties

Yesterday, I woke up to an email from VaultPress (the program I use to back up my website) saying they were having trouble connecting to my domain and that I should check that my VaultPress plugin was up-to-date. So I went to log in to my dashboard only to see this screen:

Talk about an “Oh, shit!” moment.

What Happened?

I got my domain at the same time we got the domain for the Miners Creek Band website. Instead of buying two main domains, we decided to make mine an Addon Domain to the Miners Creek one. This made sense considering I wasn’t working at the time and I wasn’t sure if this whole blogging thing was something I could commit to.

Anyway, we recently changed the hosting for our Miners Creek site, so we thought that it was time to uncouple the two domains. But instead of contacting an expert and asking how to do that, we just bumbled our way through it and unassigned my domain, which disconnected it from its content (I don’t know the specific technical explanation for this, can you tell?).

So, I undid the unassignment, hoping that would fix the problem. Here’s the screen I got when I tried logging into my dashboard:

At this point, I’m an emotional wreck. I can feel an anxiety attack coming. I haven’t had my coffee yet and my period’s just started so everything hurts and everything is already awful.

So I took a step back and wrote some feminist songs (like you do) and typed up some story ideas and tried to clear my head.

How I Fixed It

I’m not sure if there was a better, more streamlined way to have done this. I think I’ve demonstrated that my computer competency extends to pressing buttons and making mistakes until I finally find the thing that actually works. The good thing is that if it happens again, I usually remember what I did before.

First, I reinstalled WordPress under my domain and connected it to my WordPress account.

Then, I set up an FTP account for my domain (don’t ask me what it stands for), which allows outside entities to upload files to the domain.

Then, I activated the VaultPress Plug-in and gave VaultPress FTP access and initiated a restore.

And everything came back!

I still have to figure out how to make my domain its own entity and not an add-on to the Miners Creek domain, but I think I’ll ask for help this time.

Moral

Ask the experts before making a mess.

Don’t delete your own website.

BACK THINGS UP!!!!!

Thank you for reading, feel free to roast me in the comments.